"Drum Taps" and Battle-Pieces: The Blossom of War

Abstract

every significant historical event of the Civil War. Walt Whitman's Drum Taps lacks even one poem whose subject is historical fact. Battle-Pieces follows the chronology of history from John Brown's raid through Lee's appearance in the Capitol. In Drum Taps, however, time is measured by the sequence in which the poet has recast and reordered personal memories. Melville makes use of the Bible, Shakespeare, Milton, Rebellion Record, contemporary painting and numerous other materials for sources of theme and metaphor. Whitman's poems make no allusion to any world beyond the poet's experiences. Battle-Pieces is given a formal order by deliberate pairings of related poems. The Conflict of Convictions is the twin of A Canticle, The March into Virginia the pair of On the Slain Collegians, and Apathy and Enthusiasm the mate to The Fall of Richmond. movement of Drum Taps is simply from one poem to its successor. Melville consciously employs a group of recurring symbols in order to relate one poem to another. Compared to Melville's Dome, bird, river and meteor, Whitman has only his drum tap, and even this serves more as a metrical device than a unifying symbol. In an attempt to make BattlePieces both public and ceremonial, Melville uses a wide variety of traditional poetic forms. Ballad, elegy, psalm, verse epitaph and monologue are all represented in an equally wide variety of meters. Not concerned with public statement, Whitman avoids the more public of poetic forms and writes of national cataclysm in organic free verse that personalizes the