Rough, grim, clumsy - Drum-Taps and Walt Whitman versus Henry James

I would sing in my copious song your census returns of
             The States,
The tables of population and products – I would sing of
             Your ships and their cargoes,  (“Year of Meteors”)

But luckily Walt Whitman only threatens to sing songs of the census.  The short Drum-Taps (1865) and shorter Sequel to Drum-Taps contain Whitman’s Civil War poems, the usual mix of bombast and sublimity, nonsense and profundity, “the effort of an essentially prosaic mind to lift itself, by a prolonged muscular strain, into poetry.”

That is a young Henry James reviewing Drum-Taps for The Nation (pp. 629-34 the first volume of the Library of America Essays).  James’s review is most interesting as an example of a horrible mismatch of sensibility:

But we have seen that Mr. Whitman prides himself especially on the substance – the life – of his poetry.  It may be rough, it may be grim, it may be clumsy – such we take to be the author’s argument – but it is sincere, it is sublime, it appeals to the soul of man, it is the voice of a people.  (632)

Rough, grim, democratic – what could be less like James?

I have an advantage over James in that I know – I have read it many times – that Whitman is a great poet, one of the greatest, so I can be careful to adapt myself to received opinion.  Perhaps another advantage is that I am better trained at reading Whitman, so I can tell the difference between the more minor stuff and the book’s one real masterpiece, “When Lilacs Last in the Door-Yard Bloom’d,” a poem that mysteriously incorporates elements of the rest of Drum-Taps and many of the best poems of Leaves of Grass as well.

    Come, lovely and soothing Death,
Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving,
In the day, in the night, to all, to each,
Sooner or later, delicate Death.

***

    The night, in silence, under many a star;
The ocean shore, and the husky whispering wave, whose voice I know;
And the soul turning to thee, O vast and well-veil’d Death,
And the body gratefully nestling closer to thee.  (from stanza 16)

“Lilacs” is somehow a quiet poem in a book of loud poems, whatever that might mean.  They are all written at the same volume.  Leslie Fiedler notices the poem’s “disturbing vagueness,… a sense that its occasion is only nominal, that it mourns someone or something only accidentally represented by Lincoln”* which I take as the source of its power.  Whitman is a perplexing case, a poet who is easily led by specifics into kitsch, but is good with the mysteries of the soul and the sea.

I had to track down a facsimile edition, but it was worth reading Drum-Taps as a unit, as a book.  The dubious poems took on some life, and the good poems seemed better.  I want to work through an example tomorrow.  Whitman reworked all of the material in subsequent editions of Leaves of Grass, but it is worth reading fresh, as if the war has not yet ended, as if Lincoln is still alive.

*  “Walt Whitman: Portrait of the Artist,” No! in Thunder: Essays on Myth and Literature, 1960, p. 68.