Walt Whitman and Modern Music

War, Desire, and the Trials of Nationhood

Lawrence Kramer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781135672492
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Musica

Walt Whitman's poetry, especially his Civil War poetry, attracted settings by a wide variety of modern composers in both English- and German-speaking countries. The essays in this volume trace the transformation of Whitman's nineteenth-century texts into vehicles for confronting twentieth-century problems-aesthetic, social, and political. The contributors pay careful attention to music and poetry alike in examining how the Whitman settings become exemplary means of dealing with both the tragic and utopian faces of modernism. The book is accompanied by a recording by Joan Heller and Thomas Stumpf of complete Whitman cycles composed by Kurt Weill, George Crumb, and Lawrence Kramer, and the first recording of four Whitman songs composed in the 1920s by Marc Blitzstein.

CHAPTER 1
"Red War Is My Song"

Whitman, Higginson, and Civil War Music

John M. Picker

DOI: 10.4324/9781315052885-1

Although both Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Walt Whitman produced invaluable records of their experiences during the Civil War, their relationship was marked by fierce animosity. Higginson often made clear in his essays and diaries that he could not stomach Whitman's poetry: "I encountered Whitman's 'Leaves of Grass' for the first time on my first voyage in an Azorian barque," Higginson wrote in 1905, "and it inspires to this day a slight sense of nausea, which it might, after all, have inspired equally on land."¹ In a famously damning review, he objected to the poetry's explicit sexual references, which he considered "nauseous passages": "Whitman's love, if such it can be called, is the sheer animal longing of sex for sex—the impulse of the savage, who knocks down the first woman he sees, and drags her to his cave. On the whole, the condition of the savage seems more wholesome, for he simply gratifies his brute lust and writes no resounding lines about it."² Higginson "concluded that Whitman lacked the stylistic control of a poet" and that reading his poems was like "bringing home a sackful of pebbles from the beach and asking you to admire the collected heap as a fine sea view."³

Most important, the colonel believed that Drum-Taps, Whitman's collection of Civil War poetry, was hypocritical and illegitimate. According to Higginson, Whitman "talks of labor as one who has never really labored; his 'Drum-Taps' proceed from one who has never personally responded to the tap of the drum."⁴ While all of Whitman's poetry, wrote Higginson, displayed "a certain quality of hollowness," this was "nowhere more felt than in the strains called 'Drum-Taps'."⁵ Higginson perceived as "hollow" the fact that Whitman's war poems emanated from one who had served his country as a nurse and not a soldier. "Hospital attendance is a fine thing, no doubt, yet if all men, South and North, had taken the same view of their duty that Whitman held, there would have been no occasion for hospitals on either side"—so Higginson commented in his memoirs, his traditional sense of military duty otherwise blinding him to the sheer sanity of such an outcome.⁶ His deprecatory accusations finally manifested themselves in action when, in 1886, upholding the belief that Whitman had indeed avoided the true call to arms during the war, Higginson vehemently opposed an attempt to provide a pension for the poet.⁷

Whitman responded to such personal attacks less publicly but with equal fire. In a conversation with Horace Traubel in 1888, Whitman referred to Higginson "with his strict, straight notions of literary propriety" as one of his "enemies, creatures natively antipathetic."⁸ "Oh! damn Higginson!" Whitman reportedly said to Träubel when told that the colonel was visiting Camden in 1890, "… that's my compliment to [him]!"⁹ Whitman considered Higginson's relentless criticism of his poetry a threat to its radical experiments with form, and he rightly saw Higginson himself as an obstacle to his economic security.¹⁰ In retaliation, the poet dismissed Higginson's literary judgments as "thin" and his "literary crowd" as "the good fellows who had an awful belief in respectability—an awful hunger to be gentlemen." He reserved particular bile for the colonel, designating him a "lady's man" who "amounts to nothing," who "has always been mere sugar and water. He lacks all else."¹¹

Despite Higginson's and Whitman's mutual disgust, however, the authors' Civil War writings reveal a significant resemblance. Both Drum-Taps (1865) and Army Life in a Black Regiment (1870) invoke music as essential to the uniting of communities amid a war of national dissolution. In a wider sense, Drum-Taps and Army Life successfully bridge the gap between written and aural modes of representation. Yet this general resemblance ultimately gives way to the kind of deeper opposition one would expect between the two authors, for Whitman and Higginson treat a similar theme using contrary techniques. Each man's work foregrounds a different kind of interaction between Civil War texts and wartime music. Whereas Whitman constructs the poems of Drum-Taps as a musical expression of the war, Higginson in his Army Life transforms Civil War music into written text.

The Music of Drum-Taps

The title Drum-Taps indicates that Whitman wants to draw attention to the musical structure of his collection and to the ways in which martial music can represent the contrary states of war. Just as the words "drum-taps" suggest both inspiring drumbeats and the somber bugle call of "taps," so the poems follow a particular movement from an opening "reveille tattoo" to the solemn music of mourning.¹² Although Michael Moon characterizes this movement between the poems of "hectic anticipation" and the later elegies and memorials as one between "discordant rhetorics," such a tonal division in fact achieves a certain unity when considered from a musical perspective.¹³ In his article on the psychology of Civil War music, James Stone writes that military music serves its audience in two ways: either as a "lubricant," to rouse soldiers to march and fight, or as a "sedative," to occupy soldiers' less active moments and relieve them from thoughts of battle.¹⁴ This division has particular significance for Whitman, because he captures martial music's abilities both to rouse and to soothe, to energize and to calm, in the title of his text as well as individual poems throughout Drum-Taps.

It is not surprising that Whitman assumes the role of singer in the volume: "I myself as connector, as chansonnier of a great future," he exclaims in "The Centenarian's Story" (96), and in "City of Ships" he tells us, "in peace I chanted peace, but now the drum of war is mine, / War, red war is my song" (16-17).¹⁵ Throughout much of Leaves of Grass, of course, Whitman characterizes himself as a singer and his poems as songs, but this tactic has greater significance within Drum-Taps, for by using it here, Whitman traces for his project a lineage extending back to Virgil, who famously begins his Aeneid, "Of arms and a man I sing." Furthermore, it is important to consider that the songs that became popular during the Civil War often had powerful political significance. The Army of the Potomac, for instance, went so far as to ban "When This Cruel War Is Over" on the grounds that it caused desertion, and "the 'Marseillaise' was so identified with the Confederacy that when it was sung by a foreign troupe in New York the performers were thrown into jail as suspected secessionists."¹⁶ Popular songs could serve as expressions of protest and pride in the Civil War much as they would a century later during the Vietnam War. Identifying himself as a wartime singer, then, Whitman superimposes the epic tradition of the past on the potentially dangerous popular role of the present. What is more, through his use of martial music, as I will show, Whitman moves beyond the role of singer to represent military-instrument performances and the sounds of battle themselves.

The opening poems of Drum-Taps feature rousing music suggestive of Whitman's eagerness for war. Even as he maintains his role as wartime bard, however, Whitman enters into another guise: "I have charged myself, heeded or unheeded, to compose a march for these States," he later claims ("Not The Pilot," 4), and he indeed serves through much of Drum-Taps as a march composer who commands "the drum of war." "First O Songs for a Prelude," the poem that begins the collection, shows how Whitman's Manhattan anticipates war in specifically musical terms, moving from the lull of opera to the pulse of the march:

How your soft opera-music changed, and the drum and fife were heard in their stead,

How you led to the war, (that shall serve for our prelude, songs of soldiers)

How Manhattan drum-taps led. (8-10)

Manhattan's rhythmic sounds are echoed in words that make extensive use of tense vowels and explosive stops: "Lightly strike on stretch'd tympanum pride and joy in my city," Whitman begins the poem (2). Whitman's manipulation of percussive sound allows this opening phrase to strike like drum-taps on eardrums.¹⁷ The electric jolt of the war hits the city like a drumbeat:

… unawares the lady of this teeming and turbulent city, … suddenly,

At dead of night at news from the south,

Incens'd struck with clinch'd hand the pavement. (12-16)

What is more, the transformation of the name of his home into percussive taps—"Mannahatta a-march—and it's O to sing it well!"—reveals martial music altering Whitman's own language (48). Whitman indicates that although the war comes unexpectedly and disrupts city life, it gives Manhattan a new tempo and the poet himself a new role: the singer as drumbeater, the "hectic" keeper of march-time.¹⁸

Whitman goes on to suggest that the movement from peace to war necessitates an equally radical shift in music and rhythm. This change involves the surrendering of speech to the sounds of war. In "First O Songs," Whitman indicates that the new bustle of "arming" leaves no room for the spoken word:

The tearful parting, the mother kisses her son, the son kisses his mother,

(Loth is the mother to part, yet not a word does she speak to detain him,)

The tumultuous escort, the ranks of policemen preceding, clearing the way,

The unpent enthusiasm, the wild cheers of the crowd for their favorites,

The artillery, the silent cannons bright as gold, drawn along, rumble lightly over the stones,

(Silent cannons, soon to cease your silence,

Soon unlimber'd to begin the red business;)

All the mutter of preparation, all the determin'd arming … (36-43)

Manhattan's noisy war music, its "tumultuous escort," "wild cheers," and its cannons' rolling "rumble," relegate to mere parentheses the desires of the mother who holds back her words to her son. Whitman again shows the powerlessness of speech in "Beat! Beat! Drums!" when he urges readers to "Mind not the old man beseeching the young man, / Let not the child's voice be heard, nor the mother's entreaties" (18-19). Indeed, in the early poems of Drum-Taps, the voices of individuals no longer have an audience in a society dominated by the music of war. The human voice is displaced by the "rumble" of "preparation" and the song of the cannon: "[I] heard your determin'd voice launch'd forth again and again, / Year that suddenly sang by the mouths of the round-lipp'd cannon" ("Eighteen Sixty-One," 14-15). The "determin'd voice" of these poems does not murmur words so much as generate rhythm, nor does it chant peace so much as strike the beat of war. Whitman emphasizes the silencing of conversation and speech in these poems—indeed, they themselves mimic such silence in their percussive musicality—to suggest that rational dialogue has no place alongside "the mutter of preparation," the relentless rumbling forth of a seemingly inevitable military conflict.

In "Beat! Beat! Drums!" Whitman most insistently conveys the raw, explosive playing of martial drums and brass. The repetition of the heavily syncopated line "Beat! beat! drums!—blow! bugles! blow!" produces a rhythm of rising urgency over the poem's three stanzas (1, 8, 15). Whitman exhorts the music of bugles and drums to move swiftly, like a brush fire through a small town: "through the windows—through doors—burst like a ruthless force" (2). The concentrated, surging sonic force overpowers the church, schoo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Series Editor’s Foreword
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 “Red War Is My Song”: Whitman, Higginson, and Civil War Music
• Chapter 2 “No Armpits, Please, We’re British”: Whitman and English Music, 1884-1936
• Chapter 3 Eros, Expressionism, and Exile: Whitman in German Music
• Chapter 4 Reclaiming Walt: Marc Blitzstein’s Whitman Settings
• Chapter 5 A Visionary Backward Glance: The Divided Experience in Paul Hindemith’s When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d: A Requiem “For Those We Love”
• Chapter 6 “I’m an American!” Whitman, Weill, and Cultural Identity
• Chapter 7 Three American Requiems: Contemplating “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”
• Chapter 8 Like Falling Leaves: The Erotics of Mourning in Four Drum-Taps Settings
• Contributors
• Notes to the Compact Disc
• Index of Names
• Index of Titles