In January 1863 he moved to Washington, D.C., a city then continuously under the threat of Confederate invasion and the receiving center for Union war casualties. Too old to fight (and perhaps lacking the inclination to bear arms), he began his service as a psychological nurse to wounded and sick soldiers in the Broadway Hospital in New York. In a poem written in 1871 and placed in the first "cluster" of pieces in the definitive Osgood edition of Leaves of Grass (1881) he declared: "my book and the war are one." 1 Unlike the other major writers of his day, Whitman had identified himself closely and intensely with the war effort. Indeed, Whitman was careful to announce the importance of the Conflict in regard to his poetry, which evolved as the nation evolved. Perhaps for the poet who considered the United States "essentially the greatest poem" the war dramatized the dignity and strength of the common man in democratic America-a theme that had dominated his antebellum poetry. It is well known to literary historians that Walt Whitman was profoundly affected by the American Civil War (1861-1865).
Walt Whitman, the war, and his soldier-brother Loving, ed., The Civil War Letters of George Washington Whitman (Durham: Duke University Press, 1975).
0 kommentar(er)
