Name: Drum-Taps
Price: 15.74 EUR
Availability: InStock
Author: Whitman, Walt
ISBN: 9781723242915

Type

Physical Book

Author

Walt Whitman

Publisher

Createspace

Language

English

Pages

100

Format

Paperback

Dimensions

22.9 x 15.2 x 0.5 cm

Weight

0.15 kg.

ISBN13

9781723242915

Synopsis "Drum-Taps"

The next group of poems is unique in Whitman's work. These poems present a mode of seeing unarguably associated with the discovery and development of photography. Poems such as "Cavalry Crossing a Ford", "Bivouac on a Mountain Side", "An Army Corps on the March", and "By the Bivouac's Fitful Flame" all vividly describe an army that is on the move during a hard day's march, at rest as the daytime fades away, the sensation of marching into combat, and the sleepless night of a soldier sitting at a fire's side, respectively. It is with this vigorous imagery that Whitman describes the evolution of the participants in this war. For example, "By the Bivouac's Fitful Flame" relentlessly describes the hollow feeling a soldier begins experience as his naïve enthusiasm for war slips away and he must now come to grips with the terror and suffering of conflict. The poet's sense of the ennobling struggle abates and now he presented with a challenge to prove his strength in the face of such terror. Much the same way that the Union must demonstrate its strength in the face of this conflict it has feared for over a decade. Whitman's imagery is interesting in how it shifts between poems. These poems have easy-rhyming rhythms that strip away his fondness of bombastic complexity and simply reports what is there (almost in the same way as a journalist). Conversely, poems in other sections have no such simple flow, instead using free verse which forces the reader to discover this higher meaning before they can even truly enjoy the poem.

Walt Whitman

(Author)

View Author's Page

Walt Whitman (1819-1892) is, undoubtedly, the most influential poet in American literature. He was born in West Hills, Long Island, the second of nine children in a family close to the Quaker creed. At the age of eleven, he finished his formal education and began working as an apprentice at the weekly The Patriot, where he would start writing his first texts. After working for other newspapers and magazines, in 1850 he decided to fully dedicate himself to poetry. Five years later, the first edition of the famous Leaves of Grass was published, consisting of twelve poems and whose 795 copies were funded by the author himself. The poetry collection aroused great interest and was widely distributed, partly due to the fascination it sparked in philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson. During the Civil War, Whitman voluntarily served as a nurse in Washington D.C., an experience he would capture in The Great Army of the Sick (1863) and Memories of the War (1875). After the conflict ended in 1965, he published Drum-Taps. While employed at the Attorney General's Office, Whitman continued to raise the pen to write verses like those of "O Captain! My Captain!", which, along with others, would complete the successive editions of Leaves of Grass up to the ninth and definitive, which consisted of a total of more than four hundred poems.

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