Drum-Taps
1865
Drum-Taps is not poetry written about war from a safe distance. Walt Whitman walked the battlefields and hospital wards of the Civil War, and these poems carry that intimacy in every line. He held men as they died. He smelled the ghastly sweetness of wounds going bad. He watched America consume itself, and he wrote what he saw with a directness that still startles. The collection moves from the percussion of combat to the stunned silence that follows, from individual grief to the weight of a nation's sacrifice. When Lincoln was assassinated months after the war's end, Whitman added 'O Captain! My Captain!', an elegy so perfectly ache-laden it has never stopped breaking hearts. There is no glory here, no rose-tinted myth-making. Only the unbearable reality of what it costs to be human in times of crisis, and the stubborn, persistent love that persists even in death. This is essential American literature, written in blood and grief and terrible tenderness.
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“O to struggle against great odds, to meet enemies undaunted! To be entirely alone with them, to find how much one can stand! To look strife, torture, prison, popular odium, face to face! To mount the scaffold, to advance to the muzzles of guns with perfect nonchalance! To be indeed a God!””
— Walt Whitman
“I exist as I am, that is enough,””
— Walt Whitman
“This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown, or to any man or number of men”
— Walt Whitman
“Life breaks into beauty again and we realize that man may bring hell itself into the world, but that Nature ever patiently waits to be his natural paradise.””
— Walt Whitman
“am integral with you, I too am of one phase and of all phases.””
— Walt Whitman
“Has any one supposed it lucky to be born?””
— Walt Whitman
“All truths wait in all things,””
— Walt Whitman
“I hear the sound I love, the sound of the human voice,””
— Walt Whitman
“Seeing, hearing, feeling, are miracles, and each part and tag of me is a miracle.””
— Walt Whitman
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Whitman, Walt. Drum-Taps. Lex, lex-books.com/book/drum-taps-828f8d6e-58a3-4c7f-beb9-b39e2adcaa20.Whitman, W. (1865). Drum-Taps. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/drum-taps-828f8d6e-58a3-4c7f-beb9-b39e2adcaa20Whitman, Walt. Drum-Taps. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/drum-taps-828f8d6e-58a3-4c7f-beb9-b39e2adcaa20.
