Civil War Poetry and Prose

Walt Whitman experienced the agonies of the Civil War as a dedicated volunteer throughout the conflict in Washington's overcrowded, understaffed military hospitals. This superb collection of his poems, letters, and prose from the war years, filled with the sights and sounds of war and its ugly aftermath, expresses a vast and powerful range of emotions.
Among the poems include here, first published in Drum-Taps (1865) and Sequel to Drum-Taps (1866), are a number of Whitman's most famous works: "O Captain! My Captain!" "The Wound-Dresser," "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," and "Come Up from the Fields, Father." The letters and prose selections—including Whitman’s musings on the publication of his works and the wounded men he tended as well as his impressions of President Abraham Lincoln traveling around Washington—offer keen insights into an extraordinary era in American history.



 

Leaves of Grass; First O Songs for a Prelude; Eighteen Sixty-One; Beat! Beat! Drums; From Paumanok Starting I Fly Like a Bird; Song of the Banner at Daybreak; Virginia - The West; Cavalry Crossing a Ford; Bivouac on a Mountain Side; An Army Corps on the March; By the Bivouac's Fitful Flame; Come Up from the Fields Father; Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night; A March in the Ranks Hard-Prest, and the Road Unknown; A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and Dim; As Toilsome I Wander'd Virginia's Woods; Year That Trembled and Reel'd Beneath Me; The Wound-Dresser; Long, Too Long America; Dirge for Two Veterans; Over the Carnage Rose Prophetic a Voice; The Artilleryman's Vision; Race of Veterans; O Tan-Faced Prairie Boy; Look down Fair Moon; Reconciliation; To a Certain Civilian; Spirit Whose Work Is Done; To the Leaven'd Soil They Trod; When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd; O Captain! My Captain!; Hush'd Be the Camps To-Day; This Dust Was Once the Man; Quicksand Years; Old War-Dreams; Ashes of Soldiers; Pensive on Her Dead Gazing; Camps of Green; Bathed in War's Perfume; Solid, Ironical, Rolling Orb; Memoranda during the War; To Mrs. Louisa Whitman; To Nat Bloom and Fred Gray; To Mrs. Louisa Whitman; To Hugo Fritsch; To Julia Elizabeth Stilwell; To Lewis Kirk Brown and Hospital Comrades; To Elijah [Douglass] Fox; To Mrs. Louisa Whitman; To Mrs. Louisa Whitman; To Mrs. Louisa Whitman; To Charles W. Eldrige; To William D. O'Connor; To Mrs. Irwin; To Mrs. Louisa Whitman