Reading Whitman’s Postwar Poetry

Abstract

Two significant problems face the student who wishes to read beyond Whitman's stunning achievements in “Song of Myself,” “The Sleepers,” “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” “As I Ebb'd with the Ocean of Life,” and “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd.” The first problem concerns the clear changes in Whitman's voice and style in the post-Civil War poems. Where Emerson rather quizzically praised the 1855 Leaves of Grass as a “strange mixture of the Bhagavad-Gita and the New York Herald,” most twentieth-century critics remark disapprovingly of the abstract, archaic vocabulary and conventional poetic form of the late poetry. Though Whitman is often considered America's greatest poet, he is accorded greatness on the strength of the first ten years of his career. The second problem is perhaps even more critical and relates to the shape of Whitman's career. If the prewar style represents Whitman at his best, then the twenty-seven years of his postwar writing should be read as a story of decline and failure. But this tragic narrative in fact mixes two plots - one concerning Whitman's life of illness and depression, particularly in the 1870s; the other concerning the majority of his public years as a writer, including the three postwar editions of Leaves , the so-called Deathbed Edition of 1891-2, and the voluminous prose of Democratic Vistas , Specimen Days c, and Prose Works 1892 .