Chapter 4 - Poetry after the Civil War

Summary

By the time the Civil War broke out in 1861, just after the publication of the third (1860) edition of Leaves of Grass, Whitman had discovered his poetic voice and established the major trends in writing that would absorb him for the rest of his career. After this point, according to the critical view that prevailed throughout most of the twentieth century, his work diminished in quality; he had done his best work during the burst of inspiration in the 1850s and produced only the occasional masterpiece thereafter. In recent years, this overarching narrative of his poetic development has been revised, if not abandoned. Critics have reevaluated the influence of the Civil War on Whitman's work (both the revisions of Leaves of Grass and the production of new poetry and prose), have taken a stronger interest in his wartime writings, and have advanced claims for a continued record of poetic excellence that reaches farther and farther into his later years.

This chapter takes the position that by 1860, Whitman had indeed reached a certain point of completion. He had developed the three poetic modes on which he would ultimately stake his reputation: the cosmic/dramatic, the elegiac, and the imagistic. Yet only in the cosmic/dramatic had he attained such a level of excellence that, had he written nothing else, he would still have left his signature indelibly upon American literary history.