Walt Whitman Quarterly Review

Walt Whitman: A Current Bibliography, Summer 2011

Folsom, Ed

Vogel, Andrew

Whitman's Columbia: The Commemoration of the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 in "A Thought of Columbus"

Riley, Peter J. L.

English

Leaves of Grass and Real Estate

Handley, George

Schwarzmann, Georg. The Influence of Emerson and Whitman on the Cuban Poet Jose Marti: Themes of Immigration, Colonialism, and Independence [review]

Thomas, M. Wynn

Miller, Matt. Collage of Myself: Walt Whitman and the Making of Leaves of Grass [review]

Front Matter, Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, vol. 28, no. 4

Back Matter, Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, vol. 28, no. 3

Back Matter, Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, vol. 28, no. 4

Conrad, Eric

209
NOTES
WhiTmaN’S EarliEST aTTEmpT TO abSOrb ThE Civil War 
iNTO Leaves of Grass
Whitman’s decision to bind leftover pages of Drum-Taps and sequel to Drum-
Taps into the first copies of the 1867 Leaves of Grass marks the poet’s earliest 
move in print towards proclaiming, as he would in 1871, that “my book and 
the War are one.” but with Drum-Taps hastily appended to only the earliest 
copies of the fourth edition, the division between Whitman’s “book” and the 
“War” were still apparent in 1867, legible in the separate title page and discrete 
pagination for Drum-Taps within Leaves of Grass. however, this manuscript 
leaf held by amherst College’s archives & Special Collections suggests that 
Whitman may have begun toying with the idea of absorbing Drum-Taps within 
Leaves of Grass earlier than suspected, conceiving of a new volume, significantly 
reorganized to incorporate the war seamlessly, before the fourth edition was 
even printed. Thus, Whitman’s odd choice to tack his Civil War poetry onto 
1867 Leaves of Grass appears to have been motivated, not by any reticence to 
merge fully his book and the war, but by a simple pragmatic concern: finding 
a use for unbound copies of Drum-Taps. much like the printing of Drum-Taps 
itself, Whitman’s awkward incorporation of those poems into the 1867 edition 
was an exercise in frugality. it simply was cheaper for the poet to utilize his 
loose copies of Drum-Taps than it was to reorganize and expand Leaves of Grass.
in the manuscript pictured on the back cover, Whitman has written in blue 
pencil, “Drum-Taps / comes in here,” under which he has noted in a different 
pencil, “(after page 404 / and before page 405).” Though we cannot date this 
manuscript precisely, the page numbers Whitman lists provide a major clue. 
These notations cannot refer to the 1867 edition, which contains only 338 
pages. more likely, Whitman’s note points to the third edition of Leaves of 
Grass published in 1860; it is conceivable that this manuscript page was once 
used as a place-holder in his personal “blue book” copy of the 1860 edition, 
where similar blue penciling appears. 
by identifying the 1860 edition as the most plausible reference in this 
manuscript, we learn that Whitman may have imagined fully integrating his 
Civil War verse within Leaves of Grass as early as 1865, much earlier than the 
appended Drum-Taps of 1867 suggests. Whitman appears to be contemplating 
inserting Drum-Taps after the poem “mannahatta” (LG 1860, 404-405) and 
before “France, The 18th Year of These States” (LG 1860, 406-407). When 
the “Drum-Taps” cluster first appears in 1871, it “comes in” near the same 
spot Whitman flags in this manuscript, directly following “To the States” 
(LG 1860, 400-401) and “To a president” (LG 1860, 402). although most 
former Drum-Taps poems appear earlier in the 1871 edition, several Civil War 
poems do appear between “mannahatta” and “France, The 18th Year of These 
States,” including “Old ireland,” “Solid, ironical, rolling Orb,” “bathed in 
210
War’s perfume,” “Song of the banner at Day-break,” “Ethiopia Saluting the 
Colors,” “lo! victress on the peaks,” “World, Take Good Notice,” and “Thick-
Sprinkled bunting.” Though Whitman would not characterize Leaves of Grass 
as “revolving” around “the strange sad war” until 1871, this manuscript offers 
some of the earliest evidence of his desire to have Leaves of Grass absorb the 
Civil War even before the poet’s first experimentation in 1867.
The University of Iowa                             Eric conrad


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