ends with a quote of Whitman placing his hands on a certain Wallace, who then
slept peaceably (PW1892, 265).
48.Specimen Days, in PW1892, 75; Walter Lowenfels, Walt Whitman’s Civil War
(New York: Knopf, 1978), 123.
49.LG, 308–309 n.
- Shryock, “Medical Perspective on the Civil War,” 161–175. Lamenting the
lack of complete “mortuary statistics,” Whitman asserts that more than thirty thou-
sand Union soldiers died “largely of actual starvation” in Southern prisons. See “Last
of the War Cases,” in PW1892, 2:614–615. - “The Return of the Heroes,” LG, 360; WWC, 3:293.
52.NUPM, 2:519; Shryock, “Medical Perspective on the Civil War,” 165. - On Whitman and the junior physicians, see WWBB, 71–75.
54.Corr, 1:112, 114, 122.
55. Whitman, Memoranda During the War, 21 (text section).
56.Corr, 1:230–232. This letter of June 4, 1864, affectingly describes Whitman’s
awareness of his own impending emotional and physical crisis. - Whitman spoke these words to Charles Eldridge. See Barrus, Whitman and
Burroughs Comrades, 13; on Farnham, see Harold Aspiz, “An Early Feminist Tribute
to Whitman,” American Literature 51 (1979), 405. - “Last of the War Cases,” in PW1892, 620–621, a note inscribed May 23, 1864.
For soldiers’ often hostile attitudes toward dying, see note 32 above. - M. Wynn Thomas, “Whitman’s Obligations of Memory,” WWQR 28 (1982), 43.
- Stanton Garner, The Civil War World of Herman Melville (Lawrence: (U Kan-
sas P, 1993), 324, 361, 388. Melville’s seventy-two poems are re®ections on the war’s
battles its ironies. Apparently Whitman sensed a challenge (almost amounting to a
resentment) in James Russell Lowell’s pindaric “Ode Recited at the Commencement
to the Living and Dead Soldiers of Harvard University.” Lowell is disparagingly
mentioned several times in WWC, vols. 8 and 9.
61.LGVar, 144–146. See “Resurgemus” (“Europe, the 72d and 73d Years of These
States,” LG, 266–268), which predicts that the spirits of the martyrs of the failed
European revolutions of 1849 would return to inspire living young men with the
spirit of freedom. See also the discussion of “Scented Herbage of My Breast” in
chapter 4. - “Specimen Days,” in PW1892, 1:102–104.
- The inclusion of “Chanting the Square Dei¤c” in Sequel to Drum-Taps—a
poem that Whitman admitted he could not explain with “mathematical precision”—
appears to be an anomaly, but it does re®ect his attitude toward the just concluded
war. Three sides of the poem’s “square” are occupied by ¤gures of the Christian Trinity,
augmented by loosely related pagan ¤gures. The fourth side is inhabited by the ¤gure
of Satan. The Jehovah ¤gure’s judgments are declared to be “inexorable without the
least remorse,” thus suggesting that the war and its carnage resulted from an un-
avoidable fate. The Satan ¤gure embodies both the spirit of rebellion against tyranny
and oppression and also the contradictory spirit of perversity and evil, thus represent-
ing the complex motivations that caused men to participate in the con®ict. In sharp
266 / Notes to Pages 180–188