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Walt Whitman was already famous for Leaves of Grass when he journeyed to the nation's capital at the height of the Civil War to find his brother George, a Union officer wounded at the Battle of Fredericksburg. Whitman eventually served as a volunteer "hospital missionary," making more than six hundred hospital visits and serving over eighty thousand sick and wounded soldiers in the next three years. With the 1865 publication of Drum-Taps, Whitman became poet laureate of the Civil War, aligning his legacy with that of Abraham Lincoln. He remained in Washington until 1873 as a federal clerk, engaging in a dazzling literary circle and fostering his longest romantic relationship, with Peter Doyle. Author Garrett Peck details the definitive account of Walt Whitman's decade in the nation's capital.
In 1863 Walt Whitman first proposed to the publisher John Redpath a book about his Civil War experiences. It was never published. But in a draft prospectus Whitman described ”a new book . . . with its framework jotted down on the battlefield, in the shelter tent, by the wayside amid the rubble of passing artillery trains or the moving cavalry in the streets of Washington . . . a book full of the blood and vitality of the American people.” Walter Lowenfels has edited the book Whitman could only envision. From a mosaic of materials—newspaper dispatches, letters, notebooks, published and unpublished works—as well as thirty-six of Whitman's great war poems, Lowenfels has created a thrilling and unique document. Sixteen pages of drawings by Winslow Homer, another distinguished eyewitness, are reproduced here from the artist's field sketches. The result is a book that produces in the reader exactly what Whitman had hoped, one that captures ”part of the actual distraction, heat, smoke, and excitement of those times.”
For nearly three years, Walt Whitman immersed himself in the devastation of the Civil War, tending to thousands of wounded soldiers and recording his experiences with an immediacy and compassion unequaled in wartime literature anywhere in the world. In The Better Angel, acclaimed biographer Roy Morris, Jr. gives us the fullest account of Whitman's profoundly transformative Civil War years and an historically invaluable examination of the Union's treatment of its sick and wounded. Whitman was mired in depression as the war began, subsisting on journalistic hackwork, his "great career" as a poet apparently stalled. But when news came that his brother George had been wounded at Fredericksburg, Whitman rushed south to find him. Deeply affected by his first view of the war's casualties, he began visiting the camp's wounded and found his calling for the duration of the war. Three years later, he emerged as the war's "most unlikely hero," a living symbol of American democratic ideals of sharing and brotherhood. Brilliantly researched and beautifully written, The Better Angel explores a side of Whitman not fully examined before, one that greatly enriches our understanding of his later poetry. Moreover, it gives us a vivid and unforgettable portrait of the "other army"--the legions of sick and wounded soldiers who are usually left in the shadowy background of Civil War history--seen here through the unflinching eyes of America's greatest poet.
During the Civil War, from 1862-1865, Walt Whitman spent much of his time with wounded soldiers, both in the field and in the hospitals. The 40 notebooks he filled became the basis for the extraordinary diary of a medic in the Civil War.
Sadakichi Hartmann was born on the artificial island of Dejima, Nagasaki, to a Japanese mother, who died soon after childbirth, and a German father. He was raised in Germany and came to Philadelphia in 1882. Two years after arriving, at the age of seventeen, he paid his first visit to Walt Whitman, now sixty-five years old, who was living modestly just across the Delaware River, in Camden. Fascinated by the poet’s life and work, Sadakichi would visit Whitman several times over the course of six years, to talk about literature and to question the poet about contemporary authors and books. Sadakichi went on to publish Whitman’s opinions first in the New York Herald, in 1880, arousing the indignation of many and making him unpopular with the admirers of the poet, and later, in 1885, in Conversations with Walt Whitman.
Moving through Whitman's career four times from four different perspectives, this 1994 book investigates several major American cultural developments that occurred during Whitman's lifetime, the development of American dictionaries, the growth of baseball, the evolution of American Indian policy: the development of photography became essential components of Whitman's innovative poetics. Resisting the usual critical temptation to present a totalised, one-dimensional Whitman, this study views him instead as multiple and contradictory, a gatherer of discordant tones and clashing approaches from a variety of surprising cultural arenas. In such cultural activities, Whitman found not his poetic subject so much as his poetic tools and techniques. These cultural actions taught him how to make native representations.
Winner of the Bancroft Prize and the Ambassador Book Award and Finalist for the National for the Book Critics Circle Award In his poetry Walt Whitman set out to encompass all of America and in so doing heal its deepening divisions. This magisterial biography demonstrates the epic scale of his achievement, as well as the dreams and anxieties that impelled it, for it places the poet securely within the political and cultural context of his age. Combing through the full range of Whitman's writing, David Reynolds shows how Whitman gathered inspiration from every stratum of nineteenth-century American life: the convulsions of slavery and depression; the raffish dandyism of the Bowery "b'hoys"; the exuberant rhetoric of actors, orators, and divines. We see how Whitman reconciled his own sexuality with contemporary social mores and how his energetic courtship of the public presaged the vogues of advertising and celebrity. Brilliantly researched, captivatingly told, Walt Whitman's America is a triumphant work of scholarship that breathes new life into the biographical genre.