twentieth-century holocausts, he feared that the bravery and the agonies
he had witnessed would go unrecorded or be misinterpreted with the
passage of years. And, like them, he felt compelled to record and to pre-
serve his memories of these events—to be the war’s memorialist. By fo-
cusing the reactions to the war’s trauma in the consciousness of the per-
sona, the poems serve both a personal and a political function. They
speak for the war’s dead and for its inarticulate young soldiers, but they
also speak for the man whose presence had touched the lives of so many
soldiers. Because Whitman understood the war’s literary potential, he set
himself the task of translating the suffering, the chaos, the grief, and the
heroism of the war into poetry, observing in 1864 that the war’s events
“would outvie all the romances in the world & most of the famous biog-
raphies and histories to boot.”^25 Yet few Drum-Taps poems deal directly
with battles or mass carnage; they do not illustrate the kind of on-the-
spot war reportage that one ¤nds, for example, in the embittered World
War I poems of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon or depict the waves
of assaulting and dying troops as do such novelists as Leo Tolstoy, Eric
Maria Remarque, or Konstatine Simonov. Whitman acknowledged that
composing war poems on such a grandiose scale was beyond his capabili-
ties. “My experiences on the ¤eld have shown me that the writers catch
very little of the atmosphere of a battle,” he said. “It is an assault, an
immense noise, somebody driven off the ¤eld—a victory won: that is all.
It is like trying to photograph a tempest.”^26 He came to realize that his
literary forte was “photographing” the more intimate scenes, narrowing
his focus to picture a small incident or an individual dying or dead soldier.
Whitman’s initial dif¤culty in writing poetry about the war’s turmoil
and slaughter is demonstrated by the draft of an unpublished poem, pre-
served in an 1862–1863 notebook, which contains elements of both “The
Artilleryman’s Vision” and of the brilliantly achieved “A March in the
Ranks Hard-Prest, and the Road Unknown.” Some details of the draft
version may have originated in New York when hospitalized soldiers re-
lated tales of their terrifying battle experiences. The draft shows Whit-
man still struggling to develop the right persona and the right tone with
which to report the war. The grim details and the cry of revulsion at the
war’s brutality in the draft poem may also have stemmed from Whitman’s
witnessing the heaps of severed limbs when he ¤rst went to the front at
Falmouth, Virginia, and from his having viewed the aftermath of the
Battle of Chancellorsville, in May 1863, where masses of wounded and
170 / “Come Sweet Death!”