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Article Excerpt
Aroused and angry, I thought to beat the alarum, and urge relentless war; But soon my fingers fail'd me, my face droop'd, and I resign'd myself, To sit by the wounded and soothe them, or silently watch the dead.
--Whitman 1871 261 (1)
One of the most pervasive myths of twentieth century war poetry is the disillusionment hypothesis: that in 1914 European poets marched gaily to war singing romantic encomia to patriotism, heroism and glory but by 1918 the horrors of trench warfare had estranged them from their earlier songs and given birth to a profoundly disillusioned modern poetic consciousness. From the late twenties until the mid eighties artists and critics alike have identified disillusionment as the Great War's most lasting psychological inheritance, expressed through decades of ironic verse, realistic imagery, and anti-war sentiment. A critical discourse charting the progressive development of an enlightened anti-war consciousness persists, despite challenges by revisionists such as Dominic Hibberd, Maragaret Higonnet, and Mark van Weinen who demonstrate that such a narrative misrepresents actual production, circulation and consumption of poetry from 1914 to 1930. An overwhelming number of poets (not to mention others of the general population) continued to believe in the righteousness of the war even after experiencing it firsthand. More importantly, revisionist critics question the very suitability of one monolithic narrative through which we can characterize the multiplicity of voices in the war years. The disillusionment narrative, although certainly applicable to many who lived through the Great War and useful to understanding the impact of industrialized warfare upon twentieth-century consciousness, can hardly help us explain the widespread popularity of fascism in the inter-war period, the outbreak of another global conflict only twenty years later, or the continued popularity of battlefield adventure stories in movies, books and television.
Furthermore, most American and British anthologies require at least three poets to chart this trajectory from pro-war romanticism to anti-war protest: the romantic Rupert Brooke, followed by the angry Siegfried Sassoon, and completed in the compassionate Wilfred Owen (who penned the anti-patriotic "Dulce et Decorum Est", the most famous modern war poem in the English language). Yet not a single one of these most anthologized voices fit the War Poet model by themselves. Wilfred Owen's ambiguous relationship to the war in 1915 is well documented and Siegfried Sassoon's early war poetry (what little he wrote prior to reporting to the front) celebrates not heroic nationalism but manly comradeship--a quality that he not only continued to value in the war but which also formed the very basis of his protest. This disparity between an ideal, unified, poetic consciousness and a cemented canon of a few poets has led some proponents of the disillusionment narrative to cite Rupert Brooke as the paradigmatic poet of the Great War: "no one could have written more bitterly, more ironically, more truly of war than Rupert Brooke. There is small doubt that he would have done so, had he lived" (Rogers 9). But Brooke died before he reached the front and never wrote a line in protest of the war. The paradigmatic trench poet therefore stands as an unfinished model and a pure potentiality: an ideal only.
To find the clearest statement of poetic voice shifting from idealistic nationalism to realistic horror one must look not to the poets of the Great War, but to the poet who first fashioned himself explicitly as a war poet, Walt Whitman. Indeed, not only did Whitman arrange the 1871 edition of Drum-Taps (his poetic response to the American Civil War) according to the disillusionment narrative, but he also appended a three-line epigraph that explicitly draws our attention to the dramatic psychological shift undergone by the poet because of his first-hand experience of war's destruction. According to that epigraph (quoted above) the vision of the corpse silences the bellicose patriot and redirects his poetic mission from urging "relentless war" to testifying for the broken victims. Whitman was the first poet to take us by the hand and show us the shattered bodies of soldiers dying in makeshift hospitals, saying to us, "whoever you are, follow me without noise, and be of strong heart" (286). It is this poetic witness--with the corpse on his tongue--that supplies the paradigmatic voice by which poets and critics have come to understand and judge twentieth century war verse. Indeed an analysis of the 1871 edition of Drum-Taps reveals a compelling trajectory of poetic voice corrupted by the strange materiality of battlefield corpses.
Whitman's war, the American Civil War, marks the advent of modern war (Kinney 2) as it introduced many modern firsts traditionally identified with twentieth century warfare, including the total war concept (Sherman's March to the Sea), conscription, the submarine, aerial reconnaissance, and even widespread trench warfare. Like World War I, the Civil War took place within a particular historical moment when centuries old traditions foundered upon modern technological advances. Close order drill and marching in ranks proved disastrously inadequate to confront such inventions as the long-range rifle, fragmentation bomb, and Gatlin Gun. The death tolls incurred were massive and unprecedented. Half a century before the Somme and Passchendale, the Civil War battles of Chancellorsville (30,000 casualties), Antietam (26,000 casualties), and the Wilderness (25,000 casualties), stood as bywords for extreme wastage of life. And while these staggering statistics tend to disown and assist the disappearance of the individual, physical cost of war, photographers such as Mathew Brady, Alexander Gardner, and T. H. O'Sullivan were for the first time in history capturing and publishing images of corpse-strewn battlefields.
Like the war to which he bears witness, Whitman marks the advent of the modern War Poet. The American Civil War served as much more than a major theme in his work, for Whitman incorporated it as the lynchpin of his poetic identity; even remarking of Leaves of Grass, "my Book and the War are one" (12). In December 1862 Whitman began volunteer work in military hospitals in and around the D.C. area. His encounters with the wounded and dying of both sides profoundly affected his conceptions of war, democracy and poetry. What he saw and experienced in those hospitals had such a momentous impact that recollections of his hospital work take up a disproportionate number of pages in his autobiography, Specimen Days in America. A scant twenty-three pages cover the first forty-two years of his life while one hundred are needed to span the four war years. Whitman's hospital work was also instrumental in a dramatic reappraisal of Whitman's character. Prior to the war, the poet's frank depictions of sex and the human body generated controversy and scandalized many of his American readers, who labeled him as licentious and subversive. In 1865, this reputation led to his dismissal from a government post. In response to that dismissal, writer and friend William Douglas O'Conner wrote the now famous "Good Grey Poet" letter that established Whitman as the quintessential American poet. To rescue Whitman from charges of moral turpitude the letter argued at length that his wartime hospital service demonstrated democratic compassion and tireless service to the Union (O'Conner).
As he incorporated his war experience into Leaves of Grass, Whitman serf-fashioned himself as the nation's Wound-Dresser, a persona that he not only continued to perform through the rest of his poetic life, but also remains a major component of the Whitman legend (Kinney 9). In 1867 Whitman published the first edition of Leaves of Grass to contain the war cluster, Drum-Taps. (2) For the fifth edition (1871) Whitman rearranged Drum-Taps and moved it to the center of the volume, where it remained in all subsequent editions; placement that indicates the war itself provides an anchor and impetus for his entire body...
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