Walt Whitman's Drum-Taps
[A. S. Hill].
[Review of Drum-Taps and Sequel to Drum-Taps].
North American Review 104
(January 1867), 301-3.
It is fortunate that Walt Whitman's Drum-Taps, unlike his Leaves
of Grass, is in point of propriety unexceptionable, so that it can
be judged on its intrinsic merits.
The pieces of which Drum-Taps consists are in form, like those
in Leaves of Grass, neither blank verse nor rhythmical prose.
A poet of genuine artistic power would suffer from the absence of those
restraints which are to genius what its banks are to a river, - limitations
that aid in the development of beauty and of force; and Mr. Whitman
is so far from being an artist, that he boasts of his lack of culture,
after the fashion of "self-made"
men. Yet it is precisely this deficiency which disguises his real excellence,
and stands between him and the fame he predicts for himself. A writer whose
works are to live must have taste to discriminate between what is worth
saying in a given poem, and what is not worth saying, and must have courage
to excise the latter. The business of cataloguing the works of creation
should be left to the auctioneer.
Poets of vastly more genius and culture than Mr. Whitman possesses
have committed the error of thinking all objects and fancies equally worthy
of a poem. Wordsworth, for example, patched his shining robes with homespun;
but Wordsworth had the manners and speech of a gentleman, while Whitman
has the characteristics, good and bad, of a Bowery boy. His love of New
York City has more in common with Gavroche's love for Paris than with that
of Victor Hugo, and more in common with Tony Weller's love for London than
with that of Dr. Johnson, Lamb, or even Dickens. His glorification of America
smacks of the "We can lick all creation" of Tammany Hall. But with the
extravagance, coarseness, and general "loudness" of Bowery boys, Mr. Whitman
possesses in an unusual degree their better traits. He is not ashamed of
the body he lives in, and he calls all things by plain names. His compositions,
without being sentimental or pretty, show genuine sensibility to the beauty
of nature and of man. His braggart patriotism evinced its genuineness during
the war.
"Beauty, knowledge, fortune, inure not to me,
yet there are two things inure to me.
I have nourished the wounded and soothed
many a dying soldier;
And at intervals I have strung together a few
songs,
Fit for war and the life of a camp."
The fact that the "songs" in Drum-Taps were written under such
circumstances ought to have rebutted in the most fastidious minds whatever
presumption may have been raised against the volume by previous publications.
But the claims of these productions to consideration rest upon a more solid
basis than the author's personal services in the hospital. Mr. Whitman
not only possesses an almost photographic accuracy of observation, a masculine
directness of expression, and real tenderness of feeling, but he sometimes
hits upon an original epithet which illuminates a page of prosaic details.
He speaks of "the sturdy artillery.... soon, unlimbered to begin
the red business"; "the hurrying, crashing, sad, distracted, robust
year" (1861); the "hinged knees and steady hand" of the dresser of
wounds; the "elderly (sick) man, so gaunt and grim, with well-grayed
hair and flesh all sunken about the eyes"; "million-footed, superb-faced
Manhattan"; "the wind with girlish laughter"; the "gentle, soft-born,
measureless, light"; "the gorgeous, indolent, sinking sun,
burning, expanding the air"; "the most excellent sun, so
calm and haughty"; "the huge and thoughtful night." And in at least
three places he shows more sustained, if not higher power. The effect of
the news from Sumter upon New York is thus described: -
"The Lady of this teeming and turbulent city,
Sleepless, amid her ships, her houses, her incalculable wealth,
With her million children around her - suddenly
At dead of night, at news from the South,
Incensed, struck with clenched hand the pavement."
"Old Ireland" is personified as
"Crouching over a grave, an ancient, sorrowful mother,
Once a queen, now lean and tattered, seated on the
ground,
Her old white hair drooping dishevelled round her
shoulders;
At her feet fallen an unused royal harp."
But Mr. Whitman's faculty is, perhaps, most fully shown in the poem entitled,
"When Lilacs Last in the Door-Yard Bloomed"; in which the contrast of the
beauty and life of the opening spring with the scenes presented and the
thoughts awakened by the funeral of Abraham Lincoln is drawn with
unexpected power. The poem is, as a whole, remarkable, but we
must content ourselves with a brief quotation.
[fifteen-line extract from "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd"]
Return to Drum-Taps Review
Index