ington only a few months—by July 5, 1863—he could declare, “I intend to
move heaven & earth to publish my ‘Drum-Taps’ as soon as I am able
to get around.”^4 But because of the wartime shortages of paper he was
unable to do so until 1865. Unfortunately, when the “Drum-Taps” po-
ems ¤nally appeared in slender volumes and again when they were re-
printed in the 1867 edition of Leaves of Grass, their cumulative impact was
severely diminished by Whitman’s ineffective organization: he mingled
the death-scented poems of suffering and heroism with such unrelated
pieces as “Pioneers! O Pioneers!” and “A Broadway Pageant,” the lat-
ter celebrating a parade of Japanese emissaries down Manhattan’s Broad-
way.^5 William Michael Rossetti’s selected English edition of Poems by
Walt Whitman (1868) rearranged the war poems into “clusters” that high-
lighted the prevalence of death,^6 and Whitman followed his example in
the Leaves of Grass edition of 1871, which helped to set the model for
the present arrangement. Some textual changes to the Drum-Taps po-
ems that Whitman made in subsequent editions of Leaves of Grass also
tended to weaken their impact. From the brief dedicatory lyric “Shut Not
Your Doors to Me Proud Libraries” he later deleted the declaration that
Drum-Taps is “a book I have made for your dear sake, O soldiers! / And
for you, O soul of man, and you, love of comrades,” thus muting its em-
phasis on the persona’s “calamus” and spiritual bonding with the soldiers
living and dead. But in 1871 he added lines to the poem (subsequently also
deleted) that were intended to highlight his image as his nation’s death-
singer whose wartime poems express the concept of a “®owing, eternal
Identity... and accepting exulting in Death, in its turn, the same as life.”
Of the soldiers, he declares, “for them I have lived, in them my work is
done.”^7
In a January 5, 1865 letter to his staunch friend and publicist William
Douglas O’Connor, Whitman boasted that the still unpublished Drum-
Tap s was “more perfect as a work of art” than the three preceding editions
of Leaves of Grass because it was better adjusted in its “proportions and
passions” and more “under control.” Even though the letter was possibly
intended as a rough draft of a self-advertisement, it sheds a valuable light
on what the poet intended to achieve in his war poems:
But I am perhaps mainly satis¤ed with Drum-Taps because it
delivers my ambition of the task that has haunted me, namely, to
express in a poem (and in the way I like, which is not at all by“Come Sweet Death!” / 163