May 31, 1819: The Birth of Walt Whitman

On December 13, 1862, the Union army suffered a disastrous defeat at the Battle of Fredericksburg, Virginia; among the 9,600 wounded was George Whitman, brother of the poet. On hearing the news, Walt Whitman immediately headed south. When found, George was only slightly hurt, but the trip was a nightmare journey into the hell of modern war. The charnel house that was the battle’s aftermath deeply affected Whitman. In response to what he saw, Whitman became a nurse, comforting the wounded and writing hundreds of letters to their families for them. He recorded the soldiers’ suffering and death, bearing witness to their solitary martyrdom within a society that grew more impersonal by the day. Poetically, this act of witnessing reinvigorated Whitman’s writing with a tragic sense of the individual’s transcendental importance.

In the same way that Walt Whitman’s passionate poetry removes the mysteries of romance and replaces those mysteries with an earthy and verdant joyfulness, so Whitman’s war poetry destroys the myth of the hero and replaces it with the visceral images of the battlefield. More than half a century before Wilfred Owen’s devastatingly micrographic observation of battle, Dulce et Decorum Est, Whitman writes:

A march in the ranks hard-prest, and the road unknown,
A route through a heavy wood with muffled steps in the darkness,
Our army foil'd with loss severe, and the sullen remnant retreating,
Till after midnight glimmer upon us the lights of a dim-lighted building,
We come to an open space in the woods, and halt by the dim-lighted building,
'Tis a large old church at the crossing roads, now an impromptu hospital,
Entering but for a minute I see a sight beyond all the pictures and
     poems ever made,
Shadows of deepest, deepest black, just lit by moving candles and lamps,
And by one great pitchy torch stationary with wild red flame and
     clouds of smoke,
By these, crowds, groups of forms vaguely I see on the floor, some
     in the pews laid down,
At my feet more distinctly a soldier, a mere lad, in danger of
bleeding to death, (he is shot in the abdomen,)
I stanch the blood temporarily, (the youngster's face is white as a lily,)
Then before I depart I sweep my eyes o'er the scene fain to absorb it all,
Faces, varieties, postures beyond description, most in obscurity,
     some of them dead,

Surgeons operating, attendants holding lights, the smell of ether,
     odor of blood,
The crowd, O the crowd of the bloody forms, the yard outside also fill'd,
Some on the bare ground, some on planks or stretchers, some in the
     death-spasm sweating,
An occasional scream or cry, the doctor's shouted orders or calls,
The glisten of the little steel instruments catching the glint of
     the torches,
These I resume as I chant, I see again the forms, I smell the odor,
Then hear outside the orders given, Fall in, my men, fall in;
But first I bend to the dying lad, his eyes open, a half-smile gives he me,
Then the eyes close, calmly close, and I speed forth to the darkness,
Resuming, marching, ever in darkness marching, on in the ranks,
The unknown road still marching.

Whitman’s volunteer efforts in Washington, D.C., were divided among several hospitals, among them the one installed in the Old Patent Office Building, now the home of the National Portrait Gallery and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Whitman mentions the structure several times in his journals, and in one of his notes he calls it “the noblest of Washington buildings.” You can learn more about the history if the Old Patent Office Building in NPG's online exhibition "Temple of Invention: A History of a National Landmark."

Whitman spent his last years in Camden, New Jersey, and his home there is now a museum. He is buried nearby, in Harleigh Cemetery. Saturday, May 31, would have been Walt Whitman’s 189th birthday. For more on Walt Whitman, visit the website for NPG's former exhibition "One Life: Walt Whitman, A Kosmos."