"Walt Whitman’s mother, Louisa, had a limited education but a “quicksilver intelligence and unostentatious decency,” says Roper. Her matriarchal moral authority is clear from the family’s wartime correspondence, the main source for Roper’s book. Louisa’s letters were a lifeline to her sons George, an indomitable Union officer; Jeff, a successful engineer; and Walt, whose poetic masterpiece, “Leaves of Grass,” was still largely unheralded in 1862, when he went to Washington and became a civil servant, a hospital volunteer and a journalistic and poetic war chronicler. Roper’s book contains multitudes, in the all-inclusive and meandering spirit of Whitman’s poetry — to a fault, since Roper sometimes gets lost in domestic, military and historical detail. But he has something to say about Whitman’s hospital work and late poetry. Though often described as a “nurse,” Whitman was more like a secular chaplain, a “visitor & consolatory,” as he put it, to thousands of wounded soldiers. Roper sees this service as the application of Whitman’s concept of “adhesiveness,” which Roper characterizes as a force of “comradely love,” vaguely homoerotic, that would bind the nation. As an angel of mercy, Whitman rose to the challenge of the war, but “as a poet he was stymied,” Roper says. “Drum-Taps,” Whitman’s “main poetic response” to the war, he remarks, “is surprisingly thin.” Whitman, “profoundly immersed in the human material,” writes Roper, seemed “not really to be listening.”
NOW THE DRUM OF WAR
Walt Whitman and His Brothers in the Civil War
By Robert Roper
Walker, $28.
