"Ruthless Force": James on Whitman's War Poetry

In 1865, in first issue of The Nation, a young Henry James pointedly critiqued -- better, criticized -- Walt Whitman’s Drum-Taps. James’s main points seem to be that Whitman’s poetry lacks both an appeal to more than feeling (i.e., the intellect) and taste (i.e., a sense of the aesthetic): “It is not enough to be grim and rough and careless. … it [his poetry] pretends to persuade the soul while it slights the intellect; because it pretends to gratify the feelings while it outrages the taste … Mr. Whitman sits down at the outset and counts out the intelligence.”  Whitman’s poetry, according to James, also lacks a seriousness that the nature of the occasion, the Civil War, demands. Further, it fails to demonstrate a deep personal involvement in the war and the self-commanded eloquence to speak about it by “possessing this possession.”  James may have been correct that Whitman’s poetry does not have a pleasing aesthetic sense. James is picking up on something noteworthy about Whitman's unorthodox style, but that uncommon poetic aesthetic is part of the seriousness that Whitman’s grasp of the disruption to ordinary life occasioned by the Civil War reflects.  The jarring event that was the war called for jarring poetry to capture it.

Henry James (1843-1916), c. 1863

This serious and pervading disruption to life is manifest, for example, in the poem “Beat! Beat! Drums!” Whitman’s insight is into the violence of the sounds that signify war itself:  the war drums and bugles “Through the windows—through doors—burst like a ruthless force, / Into the solemn church, and scatter the congregation.”  They left no peace for bridegrooms or happiness between them and their brides.  Schools, farmers, cities, beds – these are all unsettled and invaded by the sounds and necessities of conflict. There are no sleepers for beds, because they are on the move.  The natural order of life is halted:  “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?” The answer implied by these rhetorical questions in the second stanza is no. 

Not only does war ignore and prohibit normal conversation, but also the natural cries of a baby for her mother go unheeded. Even the dead are shaken and find no peace: “Make even the trestles to shake the dead where they lie awaiting the hearses.”  Why?  “So strong you thump O terrible drums—so loud you bugles blow.” Whitman uses the sounds and percussion of the instruments of war (drums and bugles) to signify the upheaval to life – from cradle to the grave and every ordinary conversation in between – that the other instruments of war (cannons and rifles) unleashed.

Walt Whitman (1819-1892),
frontispiece to Leaves of Grass, 1855

Less jarring but similarly capturing how war arrests normal life is Whitman's poem ʺBy the Bivouacʹs Fitful Flame.ʺ  More flowing language describes the perhaps pedestrian image of a person by a fire in the temporary camps of an army.  There is a rich imagery in the language of this poem, such as a suggestive similar (“Like a phantom far or near an occasional figure moving”) and the repetition of onomatopoetic words (“procession winding ... While wind in procession … procession”). In fact, the onomatopoeia of the mental image is enhanced by the alliteration conjoined to it to create a serpentine slithering sound:  “A procession winding around me, solemn and sweet and slow.”  

The sights of the camps interrupt the thoughts that are proceeding and winding, “O tender and wondrous thoughts, / Of life and death, of home and the past and loved, and of those that are far away; / A solemn and slow procession there as I sit on the ground.”  War is often punctuated by waiting. Recall the Iliad. Waiting is punctuated by thoughts, longing thoughts, thoughts of home and loved ones. There is poetic skill in ʺBy the Bivouacʹs Fitful Flameʺ that captures the sights and sounds and sighs of soldiers sitting pensively and silently. That image and those sounds resonated with the nation in the wake of the war.

There may not be in Whitman's Civil War poetry the grand heroism depicted at by Homer, but there is in Whitman's verse an earthiness that carries the same seriousness of its substance. James, upon years of reflection and distance from his own brothers’ experience, later came to realize just this. He regretted his youthful review. James had a personal connection to the conflict: two of his brothers fought and were wounded. Perhaps he came to realize in time how, in light of that connection, the drum beats and bugle sounds had "burst like a ruthless force" into his mind and clouded his judgment about the war and how best to represent it.

James had also had been injured around the time of the war's beginning and was unable to fight (even if his father had not taken measures to shield him and his brother William from battle). Perhaps he was himself struggling in his own, narrative way with how to represent the disruption to life that the war had introduced. That artistic effort led James to produce three short stories of his own about the war: "The Story of a Year" (1865), "Poor Richard" (1867), and "A Most Extraordinary Case" (1868). It was a wrestling with representation of life that characterizes all of his fiction.