an emotionally engaged participant in the war and its literary interpreter
to the American people is evident in the poem “Eighteen Sixty-One,” in
which the ¤gure of the persona combines three images—an archetypal
Northern soldier, the American nation, and a Whitmanlike archetype—
into a single ¤gure. “I repeat you, hurrying, crashing, sad, distracted year,”
he exclaims. The manly self-image he wishes to project is not that of
“some pale poetling seated at a desk lisping cadenzas piano,” he asserts,
but that of “a strong man erect, clothed in blue clothes, advancing, carrying
a ri®e over your shoulder, / With well-gristled body and sunburnt face
and hands... your sinewy limbs clothed in blue.” This composite image
of the soldier-poet bears an unmistakable likeness to the self-portraits—
strong, sinewy, sunburnt, and prematurely gray (“well-grizzled”?)—that
Whitman had depicted in his anonymous self-reviews and in some pas-
sages of Leaves of Grass.^15 Still undeveloped, however, is the image of the
assertive and compassionate persona who, as participant and active ob-
server, is the center and focus of the best Drum-Taps poems.
The poet’s life changed dramatically after he visited his wounded
brother George, a captain in the Fifty-¤rst New York Volunteers, at Fal-
mouth, Virginia, where the aftermath of General Burnside’s ill-advised
attempt to break through Confederate lines at the Battle of Fredericks-
burg presented him with the horrifying spectacle of unburied corpses and
heaps of severed limbs—an experience that, he wrote to his mother, rep-
resented “three days of the greatest suffering I ever experienced in my
life.” Some of these scenes of death and carnage found their way into
Drum-Taps. The poet was once again thrust into the midst of wounds
and death when he accompanied a medical team bringing the casualties
from Fredericksburg to Washington. He was shocked to see the wounded
and the dead lying unattended in the open air on the long steamer trip or
in open railroad cars.^16 Despite his enthusiasm for the Northern cause
when the war broke out, he had serious doubts about prosecuting the war
once he moved to Washington and beheld the war’s horrors close up.
Prior to the war his attitude had been ambivalent. Like many liberal jour-
nalists in the 1840s and 1850s, he had expressed a revulsion toward hang-
ing and capital punishment, but during the con®ict with Mexico he pub-
lished articles calling for bloody reprisals against the Mexican leaders,
even suggesting that “an excursion to the South” (i.e., Texas) might be
“fun” for some young men.^17 But after having seen some of the war’s hor-
rors early in 1863, he reportedly exclaimed to the Reverend William
“Come Sweet Death!” / 167