Beat! Beat! Drums!

Walt Whitman I admire this side idolatry, so as I finish my study of Robert Frost I am especially interested in Frost's uneasy, and at times openly hostile, relationship to Whitman's legacy. In formal terms, their poetry could not be more unlike. Whitman sought a new and democratic poetry suited to what he considered the greatest poem of all: the United States itself. European models would not do:

Poetry is henceforth to win and maintain its character regardless of rhyme, and the measurement-rules of iambic, spondee, dactyl... The truest and greatest poetry... can never again, in the English language, be express'd in arbitrary and rhyming meter.

The United States was too big for the poetry of courts and patronage to survive. An expansive poetry was required, free from the shackles of cramped anti-democratic traditions, and Whitman set about creating it.

Frost had a similar ambition to make a national poetry, but in what was quite consciously a swerve away from Whitman, he developed a poetics which grew out of foreign models: 'When a man sets out consciously to tear up forms and rhythms and measures, then he is not interested in giving you poetry. He just wants to perform, he wants to show you his tricks.' In an unpublished lecture given in the last decade of his life, Frost explained that Whitman had 'decided to go entirely for scope, gave up art'. The allusion to Shakespeare's sonnet 29 --- 'Desiring this man's art, and that man's scope' --- is fitting not only given Frost's envy of Whitman, but because Shakespeare is the third in this particularly difficult relationship.

Today, Whitman's reputation in the UK is absurdly low. He has not travelled well, which is strange considering that for many decades the most important of his disciples were English poets. Kipling antagonised his teachers at Westward Ho! by claiming the (still sulphurous) Whitman as his favourite poet. 'I have written a few war poems', Isaac Rosenberg told Joseph Leftwich three months before he died, 'but when I think of Drum Taps mine are absurd'. The extent of Gurney's obsession is still not widely known because so much remains unpublished, but Gurney set Whitman's poems to music, borrowed lines, rewrote (and, he thought, improved) whole poems by Whitman, and felt entitled to write about 'Mannahatta' despite having only encountered it through Whitman's verse. It may have been easier for these English writers to praise Whitman because, unlike Frost, they did not feel themselves in competition with him.

Rosenberg did, admittedly, express some reservations about Whitman, complaining that 'his diction is so diffused'. Yet he considered that with 'Beat, drums, beat' (he meant 'Beat! Beat! Drums!'), Whitman had 'said the noblest thing on war'. I have blogged previously about Whitman and the American Civil War. 'Beat! Beat! Drums!' brings together two equal truths: that war is exhilarating, and that it is 'terrible'. The poem makes a terrific noise in its war-excitement, as Whitman insists that all activity not relating to the War must cease, and ploughshares must be converted to swords once again. However, gradually and unexpectedly the reader is brought to face the cost of that incessant rhythmical pulse. Whitman leaves the two irreconcilable truths to exist in uneasy balance:

Beat! Beat! Drums!

Beat! beat! drums!---blow! bugles! blow!
Through the windows---through doors---burst like a ruthless force,
Into the solemn church, and scatter the congregation,
Into the school where the scholar is studying;
Leave not the bridegroom quiet---no happiness must he have now with his bride,
Nor the peaceful farmer any peace, ploughing his field or gathering his grain,
So fierce you whirr and pound you drums---so shrill you bugles blow.

Beat! beat! drums!---blow! bugles! blow!
Over the traffic of cities---over the rumble of wheels in the streets;
Are beds prepared for sleepers at night in the houses? no sleepers must sleep in those beds,
No bargainers' bargains by day---no brokers or speculators---would they continue?
Would the talkers be talking? would the singer attempt to sing?
Would the lawyer rise in the court to state his case before the judge?
Then rattle quicker, heavier drums---you bugles wilder blow.

Beat! beat! drums!---blow! bugles! blow!
Make no parley---stop for no expostulation,
Mind not the timid---mind not the weeper or prayer,
Mind not the old man beseeching the young man,
Let not the child's voice be heard, nor the mother's entreaties,
Make even the trestles to shake the dead where they lie awaiting the hearses,
So strong you thump O terrible drums---so loud you bugles blow.

Walt Whitman and the American Civil War

Walt Whitman c. 1860

Here is an extract from John Keegan's latest book, The American Civil War. Its subject is the medical response to the battlefields' carnage, and Walt Whitman's role in nursing the casualties. And here is a strong essay on the same subject by Angel Price.

Whitman was not a soldier, and did not witness any fighting, but his experiences in the field hospitals inspired him to write some of the most important and influential poetry of the nineteenth century. Kipling called him his favourite poet; Gurney was overwhelmed by the 'flood' of his work, and spent years studying, rewriting, and setting to music Whitman's poetry; Rosenberg argued that Shakespeare had 'paved the way for Whitman', with the Bard's 'freedom', 'daring' and 'inspiration' becoming 'in Whitman's hands... a roadway right through humanity'. Those poets' emphasis on experience and witness was already found in Whitman: 'I now doubt whether one can get a fair idea of what this war practically is... without some such experience as this I am having.' Whitman's influence was also felt in prose writings of the Great War. The nurses' memoirs of Vera Brittain and Mary Borden are noble variations on Specimen Days.

Drum Taps (1865), Whitman's poems of the war, became incorporated into the 1867 edition of that greatest and most protean of 19th-century poetry volumes, Leaves of Grass. The war poems are, among other things, an attempt to do justice to the dying: 'every case', Whitman noted, 'is a tragic poem, an epic, a romance, a pensive and absorbing book, if it were only written.' Here is the final poem of the section, 'Not Youth Pertains to Me':

NOT youth pertains to me,
Nor delicatesse—I cannot beguile the time with talk;
Awkward in the parlor, neither a dancer nor elegant;
In the learn'd coterie sitting constrain'd and still—for learning inures not to me;
Beauty, knowledge, fortune, inure not to me—yet there are two things inure to me;
I have nourish'd the wounded, and sooth'd many a dying soldier;
And at intervals I have strung together a few songs,
Fit for war, and the life of the camp.