Whitman was too old to be expected to serve in the army during the Civil War, though his brother George Washington Whitman, who was ten years younger, volunteered and sent Whitman letters describing his experiences in battle. Whitman spent most of the war in Washington D.C., where he worked in the Union army’s paymaster office, voluntered as a nurse at various army hospitals, and sought a government appointment, eventually getting a post as a clerk at the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Specimen Days is a collection of journalistic pieces Whitman wrote during these years. Consider Whitman as a prose writer. Is he effective? In what ways is this Whitman different from the Dionysian singer of Leaves of Grass? In what ways is he the same?
Anyone who has even a passing acquaintance with U.S. history knows the basics of the Civil War. Even today, if we take the traditional estimate of 620,000 for the number of soldiers who died in the war, that number accounts for almost half the total who have died in all the wars in which the United States has ever fought. (Historians today almost all consider that estimate low, and the true number to be closer to 700,000 or even 750,000, with a few estimates ranging as high as 850,000.) The number of civilian deaths is unknown; sometimes you will hear 50,000, but that estimate is certainly low. The number of deaths among slaves is unknowable, since few records exist, but some scholars think a quarter of the slaves held in 1861 were dead by 1870, mostly as a result of starvation and disease. That would mean just under a million deaths. As we have discussed, Whitman saw himself as America’s poet in the Emersonian sense, offering an optimistic, even exalted vision of the United States and democracy. Naturally, the carnage of the Civil War and the literal splitting of the country into warring factions challenge that vision. How does Whitman attempt to process the Civil War, incorporate it into his vision, so that he can maintain his optimism and faith in his country?
Drum-Taps is Whitman’s Civil War poetry. Can you make any connections between these poems and Whitman’s experiences as described in Specimen Days
Most critics consider “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” the greatest elegy ever written by an American poet, and perhaps even one of the greatest half-dozen elegies in the English language. What makes this poem on the death of Lincoln so effective? Consider that an effective elegy is never just about the dead person, but also connects the dead to the living, to the poet himself or herself, and manages somehow to evoke meaning out of loss.