Drum-Taps

In December 1862, Walt Whitman read his brother George's name on a casualty list from the Battle of Fredericksburg and left New York for Virginia. He found George alive with nothing worse than a scratched jaw. But what he saw in the field hospitals around Falmouth made him stay. He settled in Washington and for the next three years visited wounded soldiers in the capital's makeshift wards, bringing small gifts, writing letters, sitting with men who were dying. The poems he wrote during and after those years became Drum-Taps. On April 1, 1865, he signed a contract with the New York printer Peter Eckler for five hundred copies of a seventy-two-page volume containing fifty-three poems. Two weeks later Lincoln was assassinated. Whitman added one poem to the sheets already in press, then spent the summer writing further, including two Lincoln elegies. In the autumn Gibson Brothers of Washington printed a twenty-four-page pamphlet of eighteen new poems, titled Sequel to Drum-Taps, subtitled "When Lilacs Last in the Door-Yard Bloom'd and other poems." The combined volume went on sale on October 28, 1865. Two years later the poems appeared as appendices to Leaves of Grass; by 1871 Whitman had broken up the collection and distributed its poems throughout Leaves of Grass proper. The nine poems gathered here are drawn from both Drum-Taps and its Sequel.

The selection follows the arc of the war. "Beat! Beat! Drums!" came first in time, published simultaneously in Harper's Weekly and the New York Leader in September 1861, weeks after the Union defeat at Bull Run; it is a recruitment cry, rhythmically hammering, with no room for hesitation or private life. "Cavalry Crossing a Ford" compresses a troop column into a single stanza of visual notation, closer to a sketch than a narrative. In "Come Up from the Fields Father," the war reaches an Ohio farmstead where a family opens a letter from the front and reads around the worst news in it. "Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night" records a soldier returning to the body of a fallen comrade and burying him before dawn. "The Wound-Dresser" draws directly on Whitman's hospital work: an old man recalls moving from bed to bed, dressing stumps and wounds, steadying himself against what he sees. "Pioneers! O Pioneers!" stands apart from the battle poems, a marching chant whose trochaic rhythm drives its call toward democratic expansion. The final three come from the Sequel. "O Captain! My Captain!" mourns Lincoln in conventional rhyme and meter, the only poem in the group that uses them. "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" extends that grief into a sustained free-verse elegy of over two hundred lines, braiding lilac, evening star, and hermit thrush into a structure no American poem had attempted at that scale. "Reconciliation" closes the selection in six quiet lines, naming the dead enemy as "a man divine as myself."

The book sold poorly. It moved fewer copies than the 1860 Leaves of Grass and drew fewer reviews. Henry James, writing in The Nation in November 1865, found the poems formless and self-regarding. William Dean Howells granted the collection a certain raw power but concluded that Whitman's work remained the stuff of poetry rather than poetry itself. John Burroughs came to Whitman's defense in the magazine Galaxy, arguing that the war poems earned their shape from their subject. None of these early notices changed Drum-Taps's commercial fortunes. What saved individual poems was anthologizing. "O Captain! My Captain!" entered schoolbooks within a generation and became the most recited poem Whitman ever wrote, a popularity he came to resent. "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" took longer to reach a wide audience, but by the early twentieth century critics ranked it among the finest elegies in English. Together these poems changed how American verse handled war. Where earlier poets reached for martial heroism, Whitman put the reader beside a hospital cot or a burial detail, and that plain witness has lasted longer than any of the period's patriotic verse.