These I resume as I chant, I see again the forms, I smell the odor. Still, he is aware that, even in extremity, a human bond has been established: "But first I bend to the dying lad, his eyes open, a half-smile he gives me. There is general agreement that "The Wound-Dresser," which Whitman placed at the center of every version of "Drum-Taps," is the thematic center towards which the sequence moves.
In the second section, the old veteran recalls his experiences as a soldier, only to say that they are not what was most memorable.
Adopting the pose of the worshiper—this is both humility before suffering, and reverence for the war which provided Whitman what he claimed was the most profound experience of his life—he returns "with hinged knees" to his deepest memory.
In the third section, the veteran recalls soldiers, not in their totality but in their individuality, each defined by the specificity of his wound.
The veteran understands anewthe courage it took to face the devastation: the loss of limbs, the putrefaction of flesh, the suffering, the presence of death.
At the same moment he reveals that although he goes about his rounds with a professional manner, he is deeply moved, "a burning flame" flaring deep within his breast. Returning through memory to the hospitals, in section 4 the veteran achieves an understanding that such comradeship, providing comfort to one's fellow human beings in need, is the deepest experience that life can offer.
It arous'd and brought out and decided undream'd-of depths of emotion" Whitman Little critical attention has been paid to the poems which follow the climactic "The Wound-Dresser," in large part because they eschew the deep conflicts addressed in early poems of "Drum-Taps" and the direct encounter with the war and its victims that the central poems in the sequence take for their subject.
Its recollection of wartime experience as purely experiential, rather than ethical, prefigures modern concerns with the problematic relation between esthetics and warfare, and its nocturnal setting, in which a sleepless narrator is forced to recollect his war-time experience, reveals a recognition of what today is called post-traumatic stress syndrome.
Cady, Joseph. Joann P. Westport, Conn. Glicksberg, Charles I. Walt Whitman and the Civil War. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, Thomas, M. View all retailers. Also by Walt Whitman. Related titles. Gary Snyder. Song for Almeyda and Song for Anninho. Fast Commute. Parasitic Oscillations. Zoom Rooms. Passionately he pleads for the dignity of the common people.
It is the average man of a land that is important. To win the people back to a proud belief and confidence in life, to rapture in this wonderful world, to love and admiration—this was his burning desire. I demand races of orbic bards, he rhapsodizes, sweet democratic despots, to dominate and even destroy. The Future! The throes of birth are upon us. Allons, camarado! He could not despair.
Once, he says, "Once, before the war alas! I dare not say how many times the mood has come! He had himself witnessed such misery, cruelty, and abomination as it is best just now, perhaps, not to read about. One fact alone is enough; that over fifty thousand Federal soldiers perished of starvation in Southern prisons. Malarial fever contracted in camps and hospitals had wrecked his health. During he visited, he says, eighty to a hundred thousand sick and wounded soldiers, comprehending all, slighting none.
Rebel or compatriot, it made no difference. Pity and fatherliness were in his face, for his heart was full of them. Gosse has described "the old Gray" as he saw him in , in his bare, littered sun-drenched room in Camden, shared by kitten and canary:. Whitman was then sixty-five. In a portrait of thirty years before there is just a wraith of that feline dream, perhaps, but it is a face of a rare grace and beauty that looks out at us, of a profound kindness and compassion.
And, in the eyes, not so much penetration as visionary absorption. Such was the man to whom nothing was unclean, nothing too trivial except "pale poetlings lisping cadenzas piano ," who then apparently thronged New York to take to himself.
Intensest, indomitablest of individualists, he exulted in all that appertains to that forked radish, Man. This contentious soul of mine, he exclaims ecstatically; Viva: the attack! I have been born the same as the war was born; I lull nobody, and you will never understand me: maybe I am non-literary and un-decorous I have written impromptu, and shall let it all go at that. Let me at least be human!
Human, indeed, he was, a tender, all-welcoming host of Everyman, of his idolized if somewhat overpowering American democracy. Man in the street, in his swarms, poor crazed faces in the State asylum, prisoners in Sing Sing, prostitute, whose dead body reminded him not of a lost soul, but only of a sad, forlorn, and empty house—it mattered not; he opened his heart to them, one and all.
O the bullet could never kill what you really are, dear friend. This was the secret of his tender, unassuming ministrations. He had none of that shrinking timidity, that fear of intrusion, that uneasiness in the presence of the tragic and the pitiful, which so often numb and oppress those who would willingly give themselves and their best to the needy and suffering, but whose intellect misgives them. Poe next moved to Baltimore, Maryland with his widowed aunt, Maria Clemm, and her daughter, Virginia.
Poe used fiction writing as a means of supporting himself, and with in December , Poe began editing the Southern Literary Messenger for Thomas W. White in Richmond. Wilfred Owen was born in England in He was the son of a railway man who was not very rich, so because of financial hardships he moved to France.
When he was in France the First World War began This meant that he got involved in the war and during the war he sustained a severe head injury, which led him to suffer the rest of his life in hospital. William Cullen Bryant was an American poet, born on November 3, , in the rural town of Cummington, Massachusetts, to encouraging and supportive parents. He was widely recognized as child-prodigy, for the publication of his first poem in the Hampshire Gazette in Northampton, Massachusetts at the age of twelve Byam and Levine, It was no more than a year later that he wrote the long anti-Jefferson poem, The Embargo, that was printed as a pamphlet by his father.
In the year , Bryant was admitted into Williams College but stopped attending after his father could no longer afford the expenses. Despite this, Bryant continued to write poetry as he prepared for a legal career by working in a law office and was admitted into the bar in During the war, he saw the worst of the battlefield and often wrote poetry to document his perspective on the war.
In , he was affected by an explosion and after he healed, he returned to service and died in battle in Robert Frost, a highly renowned poet of the twentieth century, transcribed many poems, and is regarded as the most influential poet of the American literary world.
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