So Long! Walt Whitman's Poetry of Death

above, / Not for the present alone, for a thousand years, chanting through you, / This song to the soul of one poor little child ...

an emotionally engaged participant in the war and its literary interpreter to the American people is evident in the poem “Eighte ...

Channing, a Unitarian minister then residing in Washington, “I say stop this war, the horrible massacre of men.” Channing calmed ...

made contact with about eighty or ninety new patients each calendar day over a three year period. Even so, his record of many hu ...

twentieth-century holocausts, he feared that the bravery and the agonies he had witnessed would go unrecorded or be misinterpret ...

injured soldiers lay on the ground, illuminated by torchlights. That horrid sight elicited his terse, embittered comment that “t ...

the dead, and none report any soldier’s outcry against going unwillingly into the dreaded night of death. Most are devoted to th ...

At my feet more distinctly a soldier, a mere lad, in danger of bleeding to death, (he is shot in the abdomen,) I stanch the bloo ...

task of burying a soldier on, or adjacent to, the ¤eld of battle was gener- ally assigned to military burial squads, who had to ...

an honorable burial for the unknown soldier, whom he addresses as “my comrade” and “my son,” he becomes the surrogate for all th ...

the newly dead,” cautions Lynch, “are not to be regarded as debris nor remnant, nor are they entirely icon or essence. They are, ...

procedures followed by hospital personnel and by some individual physi- cians.^42 Although the war would bring about countless i ...

Who are you elderly man so gaunt and grim, with well-gray’d hair, and ®esh all sunken about the eyes? Who are you, my dear comra ...

bed.”^44 The grieving families treasured these affecting letters, often a family’s only record of a soldiers’ last hours. In the ...

The death of the soldier continues to resonate in the hearts of those who loved him. “The son does not die in any single instant ...

But soon my ¤ngers fail’d me, my face droop’d, and I resign’d myself, To sit by the wounded and soothe them, or silently watch t ...

moving “in dreams’ projections” from one critically wounded patient to another. He recalls the very kinesthetic “feel” of the ex ...

many of whom were on the verge of dying from their injuries or from the consequences of poor medical practice. His letters to hi ...

death from gangrene. To a soldier with a head wound, the persona mur- murs internally, “poor crazed hand tear not the bandage aw ...

with acts of remembrance. At its beginning the now elderly persona— intent on making sure that the war’s sacri¤ces are not erase ...