Now the Drum of War

When the Civil War erupted in April 1861, Walt Whitman, at age 42, was too old to bear arms in the Union Army. It seemed that his best days as a poet were behind him as well. Half a dozen years had passed since the first publication of his "Leaves of Grass" collection, and the literary sensation over its cosmic display of passions had subsided. Whitman appeared to be slipping into creative decline.

Two of the bard's brothers, Andrew and George, enlisted in the Union army. George was wounded at the Battle of Fredericksburg in late 1862. Walt went looking for him.

So began one of the most remarkable odysseys in American literary history, a quest that transformed Whitman, the visionary egoist of "Leaves of Grass," into a man of action and engagement with the world.

In "Now the Drum of War," Robert Roper captures this turning point in Whitman's life -- the transformation of his poetry but also the dramatic new chapter in the story of the Whitman family. In "Song of Myself," from "Leaves of Grass," Whitman had proclaimed: "I contain multitudes." First among those multitudes, no doubt, were the influences derived from a large family so roiled by love and strife that it makes Eugene O'Neill's Tyrone family look like the Waltons.

Great line.

Walt's brother Jeff, a civil engineer who might have qualified for an exemption from the military draft but paid $400 for a substitute to take his place. The three other brothers were Eddie, the youngest in the family, who was mentally retarded; the disease-addled Jesse; and Andrew, the other army volunteer, who died of consumption in 1863.

While there was little Whitman could do for his bulletproof brother in the hospital, he discovered a new vocation: caring for soldiers in more desperate straits. Rather than returning home to New York, Whitman stayed in Washington, working in a patent office by day and nursing soldiers in military hospitals by night.

George had fought in 17 major battles, had his canteen shot away at Spotsylvania, and had his clothes shot through a dozen times. He'd wind up being promoted to captain.

Mr. Roper argues persuasively that George's diary notes influenced Walt's writings, including the war poems in "Drum-Taps" (1865). Still, there were some aspects of the war that defied even Whitman's skills. "History had outrun conception," Mr. Roper writes. "A way of talking about the horror had not yet been invented." Not until World War I would poets find words adequate to render the nightmare.

Walt Whitman, aided by seeing the conflict through his brother George's eyes and by using the evidence of his own senses, wrote the best war poetry possible in his time, verses that shunned sentimentality while ennobling the cause but stopped short of irony while recording the horrific effects of modern warfare.


Now the Drum of War
By Robert Roper
(Walker, 421 pages, $28)