Drum-Taps: The Complete 1865 Edition [Paperback]

Walt Whitman worked as a nurse in an army hospital during the Civil War and publishedDrum-Taps, his war poems, as the war was coming to an end. Later, the book came out in an expanded form, including “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd,” Whitman's passionate elegy for Lincoln. The most moving and enduring poetry to emerge from America’s most tragic conflict,Drum-Tapsalso helped to create a new, modern poetry of war, a poetry not just of patriotic exhortation but of somber witness.Drum-Tapsis thus a central work not only of the Civil War but of our war-torn times.

ButDrum-Tapsas readers know it fromLeaves of Grassis different from the work of 1865. Whitman cut and reorganized the book, reducing its breadth of feeling and raw immediacy. This edition, the first to present the book in its original form since its initial publication 150 years ago, is a revelation, allowing one of Whitman’s greatest achievements to appear again in all its troubling glory. Incredible as it seems, this is the first new edition—indeed, the first reprinting—of one of the most
important books about one of the most important eras by one of the most important authors in American history....the adhesive love of comrades, North and South, is the dominant note of these poems’ melody as they mourn the fallen and project the triumph of democracy in America and universally, characteristically in cascades of brilliant, full-color imagery such as none of Whitman’s disciples has ever equaled. —Booklist

“Elegantly edited… the resurfacing of Drum-Taps for the first time in a century and a half serves as a timely reminder that Whitman was not so much reveling in the carnage of a country divided – a charge leveled at him in recent years – as hoping that, in his poetry, readers would find the moral resources for what needed to come nel³