Whitman, Walt. Drum Taps: The Complete Civil War Poems; Drum-Taps: The Complete 1865 Edition [review

Abstract

Walt Whitman. Drum Taps: The Complete Civil War Poems. Introduction by James McPherson. Kennebunkport, ME: Cider Mill Press, 2015. 213 pp.Walt Whitman. Drum-Taps: The Complete 1865 Edition, ed. Lawrence Kramer. New York: New York Review of Books, 2015. xxiv + 170 pp.Two stand-alone editions of Walt Whitman's 1865 Drum-Taps hit bookshelves in 2015 beside score of commemorating the sesquicentennial of General Robert E. Lee's surrender and the end of the Civil War-an anniversary coinciding with the birthday of Whitman's war poetry collection. Both editions of Drum-Taps stand apart from the majority of those other books, celebrating one of the few collections of Civil War poetry written by an eye-witness. Cider Mill Press's Drum Taps: The Complete Civil War Poems offers visceral experience, integrating the poems with full-color and black-and-white historical images of battlefields, hospitals, and veterans. The result is collage attempting to present Whitman's poetry as documentation-eye-witness testimony to the bravery of soldiers and the savagery of war, with special emphasis on the eye. Drum-Taps: The Complete 1865 Edition, published by the press of the New York Review of Books, is text-only paperback, about one-third smaller in dimensions than Cider Mill's version, with back cover declaring this edition to be a revelation, allowing one of Whitman's greatest achievements to appear again in all its troubling glory. The differ dramatically not only in appearance but, more importantly, in the editorial approaches to the source material.Pulitzer-prize winning and New York Times bestselling author James McPherson, the renowned historian whose include Battle Cry of Freedom, introduces Cider Mill's Drum Taps (the missing hyphen in the title is the Press's own mistake) as [making] the war more real to readers of the poems and viewers of the photographs, [offering] stark portrait of the grim realities of war that confronted Whitman as he made his rounds of hospitals and battlefields (4). The editors have chosen fair balance of iconic and lesser known images of the period, including Currier and Ives lithographs, Mathew Brady and Alexander Gardner photographs, and daguerreotypes of enlisted soldiers. A majority of the images are black-and-white or sepia, and are remarkably clear for book of this size. The color images, mostly artistic representations of the war, are equally stunning in their detail, testifying to the quality of Cider Mill's printing.Any book relying so heavily on illustrations runs the risk of encountering problems in formatting, especially when pulling those images from historical archives and collections. While most of the illustrations are full-page, smaller images require internal framing to fit the 6 x 9.2 book format. Some of these frames-mock-Victorian borders against stock-design backgrounds-contain images no bigger than 2 x 3.5, mostly horizontal images presumably reduced in size to fit the vertical dimensions of the book. Among otherwise full-page spreads, these frames are clunky and often interrupt the continuity of the reading experience. Photo information and credits are located at the back of the book, so, with nearly 200 images to contend with, the reader is forced to constantly flip back and forth between the pages. The presence of the frames might suggest the book's role as curatorial item, museum on the page, but the absence of localized, focused captions and the inconsistency of formatting detract from the maneuverability of the work as whole.Cider Mill internally divides their collection of Whitman's Civil War poetry into two books, the first of which is textually and structurally identical with the Drum-Taps cluster found in the final (1881) arrangement of Leaves of Grass, thus relying on Whitman's later ordering and edits. The two books are separated by an interlude-two prose pieces detailing the inauguration and death of President Lincoln taken directly from Whitman's Specimen Days, an attribution that does not appear anywhere within the book itself. …