Walt Whitman's Vision of the Inferno, or Dante in Drum-Taps

Abstract

(ProQuest: ... denotes strike-through in the original text omitted.)Mark, I say, his economy of words-perhaps no other writer ever equal to him.- One simple trail of idea, epical, makes the poem-all else resolutely ignored. ... This alone shows the master. In this respect is the most perfect in all literature. A great study for diffuse moderns.-- Walt Whitman, 1859, from his notes on Dante and the Inferno1IN DECEMBER Walt Whitman witnessed Civil War soldier camps and army hospitals for the first time, when he visited a Union camp in Falmouth, Virginia, to look for his wounded brother George. His experiences at Falmouth helped spawn some of his Drum- Taps poems and wartime journalism, and several critics have considered this trip to be a turning-point in Whitman's views of the war and in his poetic envisioning of it.2 Yet Whitman prepared himself mentally and poetically for this trip in a seemingly unusual way for him: he studied Dante's Inferno. His copy of John Carlyle's 1849 prose translation of the Inferno contains the date July 1862, which indicates when Whitman purchased and probably read this book.3 As well, his 1862 notebook, in which he documented his trip to Falmouth and drafted many Drum- Taps poems, contains extensive notes on Dante and the publishing history of the Inferno. He recorded that he looked carefully over Gustave Dore's illustrations of the Inferno in September which were new and popular then on both sides of the Atlantic (LC 187).4 It seems that Whitman had Dante on his mind in the few months prior to his important trip to Falmouth. Why, then, was Whitman reading and studying Dante at this point during the war, and what might Dante-the medieval Roman Catholic poet so seemingly dissimilar from Whitman-have to do with Drum-Taps?5There were many personal and cultural reasons for Whitman's multiple readings of Dante in the early 1860s. For one, Whitman had already studied and admired the Inferno in 1859, and thus he was quite familiar with the significance of its contents when he turned to it in 1862. Also, just as Whitman was re-reading the Inferno and critically engaged with Dore's illustrations in September he and his family were enduring a difficult month, as Ted Genoways has shown. In that month the Whitmans grew anxious about George Washington Whit- man, who was a soldier in the 51st New York regiment. During the many weeks in which they waited to hear from George, the Whitmans heard reports of battlefield carnage, read of the Union defeat at Second Bull Run, and mourned the deaths of friends. In the span of two days in September, Whitman learned of the deaths of two of his friends, Bill Giggie and Elanson Fargo, both of whom were in the same regiment as George, their deaths a possible sign of George's own fate.6 During this personally difficult time, Whitman found it appropriate to study both Dante's career and read the Inferno, just as his more famous contemporary, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, found it appropriate to translate the Divine Comedy during those very same months.For Whitman-as the entire Divine Comedy was for Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, and other northern intellectuals7-the Inferno was a poem for the times, an epic that seemed to anticipate the terrible intramural American war. Gradually introduced into the United States in English translations during the early 1800s, the Comedy gained much currency there as an epic poem that welded late-medieval theology and imperial politics into a unified cosmos experienced by a pilgrim-poet, a vision that supposedly anticipated the rise of the modern (Protestant) world and the global triumph of republican nationalism. As read by politically-minded critics on both sides of the Atlantic, whose transatlantic exchanges reinforced each other's interpretations, Dante's poem was anti-clerical and proto-republican, and it was definitely in favor of national union. Many transatlantic readers believed that the Comedy predicted the Risorgimento's successful revolution to unify Italy as a nation-state in 1860-1861. …