Abstract
No major American writer responded more intensively to the Civil War than Walt Whitman. Over forty years old when the war began, Whitman never served as a soldier, but he enlisted on his own terms as a nurse in the war hospitals. Two of his brothers served in the Union army, and when one of them was wounded at the Battle of Fredericksburg, Whitman rushed to the battlefield to help out. One of the first sights to greet him was "a heap of amputated feet, legs, arms, hands, &c., a full load for a one-horse cart" stacked outside a Virginia mansion that had been converted to a hospital. This would remain his emblem for a generation of Americans who were literally disarmed, dismembered, by the war that would determine whether or not the Union itself would be a victim of national amputation. Caring for both Confederate and Union soldiers in the hospitals, Whitman offered his own arms and legs in the service of those young Americans who had given theirs: he wrote letters for them, ran errands, held many of them as they died. The young soldiers called the prematurely gray poet "Old Man," and he became a father/comrade to thousands of them. His unique perspective on the war allowed him to see that America had been "brought to hospital in her fair youth," and he wrote a book of poems, Drum-Taps, about the war and its deleterious effects; his commentary re-centered the war in the hospital rather than on the battlefield, focusing on sobering after effects instead of heroic actions. In his quickly appended sequel to that book, published in 1865, he added his great meditation on Lincoln's death, "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," and his popular ballad "O Captain! My Captain!," poems that would forever link his name to that of the president he loved and mourned.
Journal Title
Iowa Journal of Communication
Volume
25
Issue
3
First Page
103
Last Page
106
Language
en
File Format
application/pdf
Recommended Citation
Folsom, Ed
(1993)
"for Walt Whitman,"
Iowa Journal of Communication: Vol. 25:
No.
3, Article 33.
Available at:
https://scholarworks.uni.edu/ijc/vol25/iss3/33
Copyright
©1993 Iowa Communication Association
