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4. “By the Roadside” and Whitman’s Narrative of Poetic (Re)Awakening
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77 4. “By the Roadside” and Whitman’s Narrative of Poetic (Re)Awakening Who are you dusky woman, so ancient hardly human, With your woolly-white and turban’d head, and bare bony feet? Why rising by the roadside here, do you the colors greet? —Walt Whitman, “Ethiopia Saluting the Colors,” 1871 As formal Reconstruction came to a close and commemorating the war took precedence over the contentious political debates in the public imagination, Whitman returned once more to the task of the next edition of Leaves of Grass, the latest “extra” and a fully refashioned poetic commentary on postwar events. Throughout the 1870s, his creative energies had been more focused on his Civil War prose writing and his contributions to the periodical press, although he did take time in 1876 to compose Two Rivulets, a collection of poetry and prose intended, as Ed Folsom describes it, “to cash in on the nation’s centennial celebration” (WMB, 43). The book’s form was probably inevitable, since the poet would repeatedly turn to poetry as well as prose in his efforts to make sense of the conflict and its aftermath . He also released a “Centennial Edition” and an “Author’s Edition ” of the 1871–1872 edition of Leaves of Grass to mark the nation’s centennial (WMB, 40); however, just as he would later use his autobiographical Specimen Days to integrate his war stories into his personal history, his ongoing work of reconstruction demanded a Leaves of Grass that fully integrated the cataclysm of the Civil War into his signature text. As we have seen, Whitman continually sought to collapse the distinctions between himself, his book, and even the nation itself. A nation that sought reconstruction, and a recovering poet, required a reconstructed Leaves, as well. one, yeT of conTradicTions made In 1870, Whitman had made what appeared to be a decisive attempt to enfold his war poetry into what he then conceived to chaPtEr Four 78 be the final edition of Leaves (WMB, 32). As numerous scholars have observed, one of the most important attributes of the 1871–1872 edition is the poet’s full integration of his previous Drum‑Taps poems into Leaves of Grass, in a new “Drum-Taps” cluster and in two other clusters, “Marches Now The War Is Over” and “Bathed in War’s Perfume .” Where the 1867 edition had literally grafted the war poetry into his body of work, stitching unbound pages of Drum‑Taps into Leaves, he now prepared a “new & improved edition” (quoted in WMB, 32) that spread the poems throughout the volume. Folsom and Price suggest that these new clusters demonstrate “Whitman’s attempt to fully absorb the Civil War and its aftermath into his book . . . as the war experience bleeds out into the rest of the poems” (Re‑Scripting Walt Whitman, whitmanarchive.org). Mancuso argues, “This textual multiplication underscores Whitman’s assertion that he owed the existence of Leaves to the creative energy he found in the war itself” (“Leaves of Grass, 1871–72 Edition,” 368). While this dispersal of the war poetry may suggest the conflict’s power to inspire the poet’s creativity, other changes indicate how the poet was still working to create a structure in Leaves that could include the war in a unified whole. In her review of the publishing history of Leaves, Amanda Gailey points out that one of the most significant features of the 1871–1872 edition is the inclusion of his pamphlet Passage to India (422). Conceived as a separate project, it contained almost a third of the poetry of the previous edition (422), and Whitman had it bound into the second issue of the 1871 edition. Just as he had earlier included the unrepaginated Drum‑Taps in the 1867 edition of Leaves, he now included pages from this smaller work within the whole, “still bearing their own title page and pagination” (WMB, 33). The poet appears to desire wholeness and completion, but, as in the earlier edition, the process is still strained, disjointed. Given this strain, it is perhaps not surprising that one of the most jarring notes in the 1871–1872 edition is another cluster that appears only here, the provocatively titled “Songs of Insurrection ” cluster. Coming after the final cluster of war poetry, “Bathed in War’s Perfume,”—a cluster marked by patriotic enthusiasm and what one critic has called Whitman’s “fancy flags for public display”1—the “Songs of Insurrection” begins with the short new poem “Still Though...