The Role of the Poet in the American Civil War: Walt Whitman’s

CONCLUSIONS: COMPARING DRUM-TAPS AND BATTLE-PIECES

As we have seen, Drum-Taps and Battle-Pieces constitute two central literary responses to the American Civil War by two of the United States’ most significant poets of the nineteenth century. It is not rare that both Walt Whitman and Herman Melville felt the need to write about the Civil War, since they considered this event had the potential of transforming the history of their country. Though both Drum-Taps and Battle-Pieces were published almost simultaneously –the former in May 1865 and the latter in August 1866–, they present considerable differences which reflect the personal intentions (and contradictions) of their authors. After analyzing Drum-Taps and Battle- Pieces separately in the preceding sections of our paper, the aim of these concluding pages is to establish a dialogue between these two collections of poems in order to carry out a comparative analysis of the role of the two authors.

Drum-Taps and Battle-Pieces may be read as complementing each other, since they offer two different portrayals of the same historical event. Adopting their own point of view in their renderings of the war, both Whitman and Melville incorporate aspects the other author leaves aside or deliberately chooses not to include, enabling readers to go through different experiences and dimensions of the conflict and to obtain a more critical vision of the historical event. This offers the possibility of constructing part of the picture of the American Civil War, even if, in both cases, it is through a Northern perspective and permeated with the personal tensions and contradictions the two poets endured in such a critical situation for themselves and their country. Both Whitman and Melville felt the need to write about the war and to create poetic monuments to the thousands of unknown individuals who lost their lives in it. With their texts, Whitman and Melville engaged in the process of rescuing from the “eternal darkness” of the grave (Memoranda 8) those anonymous men who had been neglected
by the big forces of war, in order to make them visible and acknowledged by their nation. Whitman asserted that the million human beings dead during the war were obliterated under “the significant word UNKNOWN”, adding that in some cemeteries “nearly all the dead are Unknown” and wondering if any “... visible, material monument can ever fittingly commemorate [them]” (Memoranda 103-104). Whitman and Melville created their personal poetic monuments with Drum-Taps and Battle-Pieces¹ and tried to rescue these unknown men from their anonymity. Choosing to pay attention to different elements, both poets included the events or experiences by which they had felt most moved, creating their own representations of the war, transmitting them to the nation, and expecting the United States to incorporate their voices and learn from their poems.