WALT WHITMAN — Henry Seidel Canby—Houghfon Mifflm ($3.75).
By the time of the Battle of the Wilderness (1864), Walt Whitman had been working in the hospitals of Washington for more than a year, a familiar figure by this time, tall, red-faced, hairy as a buffalo, moving gently and capably through the 50 one-story sheds that, because of disease, intrigue, and what went on inside them, were more dangerous to the wounded than any battlefield on earth.
He watched the bearers bring in a boy who groaned as they carried him to the hospital gates and who, by the time they stopped to examine him, was dead. He was unknown; there was nothing on his clothing nor anyone with him to identify him.
He was one of the thousands, and of him Whitman said: "I could not keep the tears out of my eyes." Statesman of the Intellect. During that time Whitman was subjecting his prophetic and poetic vision to a more intense test than any of which literary history has knowledge. Few poets of that age considered their verse mere ornaments of daily existence; they were rather generals and statesmen of the intellect and emotions whose creations had a tangible, profitable and practical application to ordinary life. Yet even among them Whitman was exceptional; he alone insisted that he knew what America was for, why it had been founded, why it had developed as it had, and what its future should be.
With a fervor unmatched since the days of the Old Testament prophets, he went further and insisted that if his vision were followed it would bring victory, and with victory an end of human unhappiness when "all these hearts as of fretted chil dren shall be sooth'd."; The vision began to take form at the meeting point of life & death. The hospitals were halls of agony. Walking through them, visitors fainted. The men who had beaten back Pickett at Gettysburg and been burned when the caissons exploded at Chancellorsville here faced a more deadly menace than rebel marksmen. Whit man brought them oranges, lemons and sugar for lemonade; tobacco, and money.
He read to them — never his own poetry.
Through the years that reeled and trembled beneath him, when it seemed to him that no cause was being fought for and he was horrified and disgusted at the mutual butchery in the vast slaughterhouse of war, he came to know the Northern soldiers, probably better than any man alive.