For the First Time in 150 Years: Walt Whitman’s Civil War ‘Drum-Taps’

“I intend to move heaven & earth to publish my ‘Drum-Taps’ as soon as I am able to go around,” Walt Whitman told his friend William O’Connor in 1864, after a mysterious illness, likely contracted from the hospital where he nursed soldiers, claimed his health for a time. The American Civil War was in its third year, and Leaves of Grass in its third edition. With his new book of Civil War poems, Whitman meant to advocate a re-union, a reconciliation, an end to the war, and a continuation of the spirit of democracy set in motion by his earlier work. He wanted Drum-Taps to “express in a poem…the pending action of this Time & Land we swim in…with the unprecedented anguish and suffering, the beautiful young men, in wholesale death & agony.” The following January, as the war neared its conclusion, Whitman wrote again to O’Connor, explaining that the now fairly completed Drum-Taps was “superior to Leaves of Grass — certainly more perfect as a work of art.’’ Adding that although it may appear that the poems were ‘‘let loose with wildest abandon, the true artist can see it is yet under control.’’

Only Whitman could not, on this score, control his own feelings. Soon, Lawrence Kramer writes in the introduction to the new NYRB edition of Drum-Taps, “Whitman changed his mind…[and] having done so he took Drum-Taps in hand and tore it apart.” After initially self-publishing the book as a complete work of poetry, with its own empathetic logic and poetic arc, Whitman began rolling the poems into Leaves of Grass. Why, exactly, we do not know; Kramer speculates that Whitman wanted a “single ever-expanding poem” to go along with a “single ever-expanding nation.” As a result of Whitman’s caprice, only 38 of the original 71 poems featured in Drum-Taps and its sequel were to remain in later editions of Leaves of Grass.

The original version of Drum-Taps has never been published again in its entirety — until now. The NYRB version out this month is the complete 1865 edition that features not only familiar poems, like “O Captain my Captain!” and the masterful elegy for Abraham Lincoln, “When Lilacs last in the door-yard bloom’d,” but also the remaining 33 poems that Whitman published at the close of the war. The collection now published in its entirety is indispensable. /  Jonathon Sturgeon, Flavorwire