Walt Whitman and the Civil War

Walt Whitman and the Civil War
Author: Ted Genoways
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 222
Release: 2009
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0520259068

"The Fletcher Jones Foundation humanities imprint"--Prelim. p.

Memoranda During the War

Memoranda During the War
Author: Walt Whitman
Publisher: Applewood Books
Total Pages: 102
Release: 1990
Genre: Poets, American
ISBN: 1557091323

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.

The Better Angel

The Better Angel
Author: Roy Morris
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2000-07-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 019802889X

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.

Walt Whitman's Civil War

Walt Whitman's Civil War
Author: Walter Lowenfels
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Total Pages: 368
Release: 1989-03-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780306803550

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.”

Walt Whitman in Washington, D.C.

Walt Whitman in Washington, D.C.
Author: Garrett Peck
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2015
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1626199736

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.

O Captain, My Captain

O Captain, My Captain
Author: Robert Burleigh
Publisher: Abrams
Total Pages: 101
Release: 2019-04-02
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 1683354710

This beautifully illustrated children’s book explores how Walt Whitman was affected by the Civil War and inspired by President Lincoln. O Captain, My Captain tells the story of one of America’s greatest poets and how he was inspired by one of America’s greatest presidents. Whitman and Lincoln shared the national stage in Washington, DC, during the Civil War. Though the two men never met, Whitman would often see Lincoln’s carriage on the road. The president was never far from the poet’s mind, and Lincoln’s “grace under pressure” was something Whitman returned to again and again in his poetry. Whitman witnessed Lincoln’s second inauguration and mourned along with America as Lincoln’s funeral train wound its way across the landscape to his final resting place. The book includes the poem “O Captain! My Captain!” and an excerpt from “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” as well as brief bios of Lincoln and Whitman, a timeline of Civil War events, endnotes, and a bibliography.

Now the Drum of War

Now the Drum of War
Author: Robert Roper
Publisher: Walker Books
Total Pages: 440
Release: 2008-10-28
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN:

Drawing on the searing letters that Walt Whitman, his brother George, their mother Louisa, and their other brothers wrote to each other during the Civil War, this work chronicles the experience of an archetypal American family enduring its own long crisis alongside the anguish of the nation.

The Wound Dresser

The Wound Dresser
Author: Walt Whitman
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
Total Pages: 118
Release: 2018-04-05
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 3732655024

Reproduction of the original: The Wound Dresser by Walt Whitman

Lincoln and Whitman

Lincoln and Whitman
Author: Daniel Mark Epstein
Publisher: Random House
Total Pages: 402
Release: 2007-12-18
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0307431401

It was more than coincidence—indeed, it was all but fate—that the lives and thoughts of Abraham Lincoln and Walt Whitman should converge during the terrible years of the Civil War. Kindred spirits despite their profound differences in position and circumstance, Lincoln and Whitman shared a vision of the democratic character that sprang from the deepest part of their being. They had read or listened to each other’s words at crucial turning points in their lives. Both were utterly transformed by the tragedy of the war. In this radiant book, poet and biographer Daniel Mark Epstein tracks the parallel lives of these two titans from the day that Lincoln first read Leaves of Grass to the elegy Whitman composed after Lincoln’s assassination in 1865. Drawing on the rich trove of personal and newspaper accounts, diary records, and lore that has accumulated around both the president and the poet, Epstein structures his double portrait in a series of dramatic, atmospheric scenes. Whitman, though initially skeptical of the Illinois Republican, became enthralled when Lincoln stopped in New York on the way to his first inauguration. During the war years, after Whitman moved to Washington to minister to wounded soldiers, the poet’s devotion to the president developed into a passion bordering on obsession. “Lincoln is particularly my man, and by the same token, I am Lincoln’s man.” As Epstein shows, the influence and reverence flowed both ways. Lincoln had been deeply immersed in Whitman’s verse when he wrote his incendiary “House Divided” speech, and Whitman remained an influence during the darkest years of the war. But their mutual impact went beyond the intellectual. Epstein brings to life the many friends and contacts his heroes shared—Lincoln’s debonair private secretary John Hay, the fiery abolitionist senator Charles Sumner, the mysterious and possibly dangerous Polish Count Gurowski—as he unfolds the story of their legendary encounters in New York City and especially Washington during the war years. Blending history, biography, and a deeply informed appreciation of Whitman’s verse and Lincoln’s rhetoric, Epstein has written a masterful and original portrait of two great men and the era they shaped through the vision they held in common.