Drum-Taps*

            The publishers call these “great war poems.”  They are probably great war poems because they’re really great peace poems.  Because they’re great comrade poems.  There is no enemy in these poems.  There are only friends.  Whitman celebrates that enemy who is the same sort of divine man as himself.  Some people take these poems as an argument for war.  As justifying war.  As putting Whitman on the side of war.  But if you could place these poems in the trenches and have them understood and acquiesced in there’d be no war. The fighting men would become the peace men. The enemies would become friends.  You couldn’t get Whitman to say a word against the other fellow.  This fellow was the same as the other fellow to him.  North was South, South was North.  The London Times writer whose article is turned into an introduction for this edition of the Drum-Taps does his best to construe Whitman anti-Germanally.  He goes back to eighteen seventy to do it.  He says: “Whitman fancied the Germans were like the Chinese only less graceful and refined and more brutish.”  But you cant find texts for such nonsense in Leaves of Grass.  Walt was capable of going too far afield to share the petty asinin-ities of provinces.  Even his glorified America wasn’t a geographical America.  It was a universalized America.  He was as well aware of nations as anybody.  But he never clubbed one nation with another.  It was alien to him.  And so even his war poems are not armed against anybody.  He takes enemies to each other.  He introduces them.  He levels all the anti-fraternal barriers between them.  Nothing could be wholesomer than to propagate these poems at this time.  No man ever comes away from them with more war in his heart.  And yet even at that it’s doubtful if Whitman himself wouldn’t today have expressed his philosophy in more unequivocal terms. While the war people think they’re having everything their own way other influences are being fostered, In the two generations since the breaking out of the Civil War  far more formidable non-resistant or  semi-non-resistant attitude of mind has demanded the attention of the world.  This movement may not be great in numbers but it’s vast in potentiality.  It’s the sort of tendency that Whitman’s virile quakerism would have found very consoling.  Leaves of Grass is not Whitman’s book but a man’s book.  It’s not supposed to reflect Whitman’s literal life but an average man’s figurative life.  But the new American would have to use another verbalism.  This book would not have said all his say for him.  Drum-Taps didn’t teach sectionalism in the Civil War.  It cant be made to teach nationalism in this war.  It didn’t glorify battles. It glorified love and healing. Whitman never figured as the wound giver.  He was always the wound dresser. Are you afraid you’ll go soft if  you  dont kill somebody? Are you afraid you’ll become degenerate?  Do you think that if we go too long without wars we’ll forget how to fight?  And then, if we forget how to fight, that we’ll also forget how to live?  Drum-Taps wont spur you to fight.  It’ll move you to love. It wont inspire you to take up a gun.  It’ll make you regret anybody has taken up a gun.    Do you call this going soft?  Roosevelt says to us: Look at China.  I say: Look at Roosevelt.  There may be a thrill in the beat of a drum.  But is it the murder thrill or the creative thrill?  Do you feel guilty of innocence until you’ve proved that you’re no longer innocent of guilt?

                                                                                                                        T.

*Drum-Taps.  By Walt Whitman.  London: Chatto and Windus.