A sense of the past: Memory and history in Whitman's poetry and prose

Whitman's conception of history has generally been overlooked or dismissed as inconsistent, but it is in fact vitally important to his vision of America and American poetry. The inconsistencies in his thinking about history generally correspond to differences among the various stages of his development, and so I examine the course of that development throughout Whitman's early career, from the first edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855 through his poetry and prose on the Civil War.; The first edition features an expansive and absorptive persona who contains all history in the present moment, both as its culmination and as the representative figure whose experience reconstitutes all of the past. Successive editions mark various stages in Whitman's efforts to modify this vision and, in responding to the personal and cultural trauma of the Civil War, to integrate the 1855 vision into the more conventional historicist bent that Whitman reveals in his journalism. The 1856 Leaves offers a new central object of historical inscription: the nation--specifically the American nation--rather than the self. In the 1860 edition, Whitman's persona becomes a mortal and time-bound creature wholly contained within history, a move which brings with it the discovery of memory for a self to whom all of the past is not eternally present. The poet of Drum-Taps lives within a specific historical moment, the Civil War, and consecrates himself to perpetuating its memory by embodying a particular aspect of the war experience--the personal sacrifice and intense comradeship of the common footsoldiers--so that the United States might thereafter become a nation of loving comrades bound together by that collective memory. The prose that the war generated proved more problematic for Whitman. Even with a narrow focus--on the warfront during the American Civil War--textual inscription of the past proves no more successful in Memoranda During the War than would recording the whole of universal history as envisioned in the early Leaves, nor does Whitman believe that the Memoranda will be able to bring about the social cohesion and moral purpose envisioned in Drum-Taps.