Now the Drum of War: Walt Whitman and His Brothers in the Civil War [Hardcover]

Robert Roper (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 28, 2008

The Civil War is seen anew, and a great American family brought to life, in Robert Roper’s brilliant evocation of the Family Whitman.

Walt Whitman’s work as a nurse to the wounded soldiers of the Civil War had a profound effect on the way he saw the world.  Much less well known is the extraordinary record of his younger brother, George Washington Whitman, who led his men in twenty-one major battles—from Antietam to Fredericksburg, Vicksburg to the Wilderness—almost to die in a Confederate prison camp as the fighting ended.  Drawing on the searing letters that Walt, George, their mother Louisa, and their other brothers, wrote to each other during the conflict, and on new evidence and new readings of the great poet, Now the Drum of War chronicles the experience of an archetypal American family—from rural Long Island to working-class Brooklyn—enduring its own long crisis alongside the anguish of the nation.  Robert Roper has constructed a powerful narrative about America’s greatest crucible, and a compelling, braided story of our most original poet and one of our bravest soldiers.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In his astonishing frankness and sweep, Walt Whitman is the quintessential visionary American poet. His life spanned the beginnings of modern urbanization, the rupture of the Civil War and almost into the 20th century. In keeping with this larger-than-life figure, Roper (Fatal Mountaineer) skillfully weaves several books into one. Framed as an insightful literary critique, especially of Whitman's coded writings, as well as a biographical chronicle of his remarkable and dysfunctional family, the book is also a historical examination of Civil War battlefield traumas and tragedies, principally as the poet experienced them. At the center of the book, Roper focuses on Whitman's emotional relations with the young wounded soldiers he nursed, showing in effect that these homoerotic bonds can be seen as the semipaternal manifestation of his relationships with his much younger brothers, George Washington Whitman—with whom he was closest, and who had a distinguished war record—and Thomas Jefferson Whitman. The brothers of the subtitle refer not only to George and Jeff, but to the poet's many comrades. 35 b&w illus. (Nov.)
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From Booklist

*Starred Review* “Now be a witness again—,” chanted Walt Whitman in resonant lines, “paint the mightiest armies of the earth.” In this groundbreaking study, Roper reveals the degree to which a poet famous for his depictions of the Civil War actually witnessed the carnage of clashing armies through the eyes of a younger brother, a daring Union officer. At Fredericksburg, Antietam, and Cold Harbor, George Whitman survived intense combat and then captured the harrowing ordeal in letters to his anxious mother and his two brothers, one an aspiring poet. In the correspondence between the seasoned soldier and his family, Roper locates the conduit for raw material artistically transformed by the acclaimed bard. Readers soon realize how profoundly George’s letters influenced Walt, who adroitly melded George’s accounts of torrid battles in his verse with his own experience as a visitor to military hospitals. But as Roper probes Walt’s poetry, he illuminates not only the writer’s abiding fraternal commitment to his decorated brother but also his transitory sexual ties to other men in and out of uniform. Behind the tangle of familial affections and sexual passions, readers discern the imaginative genius that wove very diverse strands into panoramic literature. Whitman’s many admirers will find here a wealth of insights. --Bryce Christensen

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 432 pages
• Publisher: Walker & Company; 1 edition (October 28, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802715532
• ISBN-13: 978-0802715531
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #925,453 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Another WW Bio?, December 2, 2008

By 

D. Knowlton "thevillagebookshop" (Florida) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Now the Drum of War: Walt Whitman and His Brothers in the Civil War (Hardcover)

Other reviewers have done an excellent job portraying the essence of Roper's new book, so I will keep my words to a minimum. The answer is "yes" - another biography, and yet, it's unlike any I have read thus far. It was refreshing to hear about the family relationships, especially about George and his military career, and the voluminous correspondence. The very thing that drew Walt south was, after all, George's wounding. Read alongside other authors, eg.: David Reynolds, Jerome Loving, Harold Bloom, Kenneth M. Price, Jim Perlman, Ed Folsom, Dan Campion, and Sherry Ceniza, to mention just a few - this book adds a much appreciated dimension. You do not have to be a Whitmanian to enjoy this excellent book.

- a Whitmanian in Florida, raised in Huntington

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A valuable portrait of Walt Whitman as both Civil War bard and family man, November 17, 2008

By 

Bookreporter (New York, New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Now the Drum of War: Walt Whitman and His Brothers in the Civil War (Hardcover)

Do our kids learn anything about Walt Whitman in school these days? Do they read any of the work of our nation's greatest poet? Sadly, these are questions worth asking.

A sizeable library of books on Whitman has accumulated since his death in 1892. He continues to provide grist for the lit-crit mills and the doctoral thesis industry. For those curious about Whitman's life or just enthralled by his wide-ranging poetic flights, there is a lot out there.

Journalist, historian and fiction writer Robert Roper has taken a slightly different tack in NOW THE DRUM OF WAR. While concentrating on the poet's well-known service as a sort of unofficial visiting nurse in the military hospitals around Washington during the Civil War, he also places Whitman within his family situation --- his aging mother back in Brooklyn, his six siblings, his early careers as house builder and journalist, and his once glossed over but now openly acknowledged identity as an open homosexual.

Roper's book is not a straightaway biography. It virtually ignores Whitman's childhood and devotes almost as much attention to his heroic soldier-brother George as it does to Walt himself. It is grounded largely in family letters, in Walt's own personal notebooks and in reminiscences of those who knew him both at home and in the military hospitals and camps. Roper sees him as "the war's most knowledgeable noncombatant."

Walt Whitman initially went south to visit George after the bloody battle of Fredericksburg, just one of a long string of major battles in which George performed heroic service under hails of shot and shell, while sustaining only one relatively minor wound. Through acquaintances in Washington, Walt was able to find lodging and part-time government work that left him ample leisure to carry out his real mission of visiting the wounded laden with small articles, food items and words of comfort.

Roper makes clear that Whitman also saw these injured young men as raw material for his poetry. He gives us a goodly amount of analysis of the poems, showing how many of them reflect places Whitman had seen and men Whitman came to know in his hospital rounds. The author is candid too about the obvious sexual attraction that Whitman felt toward many of the soldiers he comforted.

His brother and his elderly mother were both uncomprehending of his poetic gifts, but both loved him and cared for him assiduously by letter. He was, says Roper, his family's father figure. George Whitman could not make heads or tails of LEAVES OF GRASS when that epoch-making collection of poems first appeared, and Mrs. Whitman compared her son's book ruefully with Longfellow --- well, if "Hiawatha" is poetry, I guess his is too.

Roper's mining of family letters and journals gives us a good idea of what life was like both at home and in the army camps during the war. Typical of Roper's lack of interest in standard biographical detail is his dismissal in one sentence of the famous incident when a minor government official got Whitman fired from his Washington job after finding and perusing a copy of LEAVES OF GRASS in Walt's office desk.

Roper's obvious interest in George also leads to a fair amount of discourse about Civil War battle strategies and campaign tactics. This is perhaps interesting up to a point, but it is easily available in quantity elsewhere and seems irrelevant to his book's main purpose. That complaint aside, NOW THE DRUM OF WAR provides a valuable portrait of Walt Whitman as both Civil War bard and family man. He was, as one hospital observer put it, "an odd-looking genius."

Happily, Roper retains the picturesque odd spellings and halting grammar of his original sources. But oddly, the book has no table of contents, and his 29 chapters bear no titles --- merely numbers.

--- Reviewed by Robert Finn

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Taps, November 27, 2008

By 

Christian Schlect (Yakima, Washington/USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

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This review is from: Now the Drum of War: Walt Whitman and His Brothers in the Civil War (Hardcover)

"When Lilacs Last in the Door-Yard Bloom'd" is a great American poem. This book gives the reader an understanding of how this eulogy to Abraham Lincoln came to be.

The family of Walt Whitman was large, with talented members intermixed with sad cases. Here the author, Robert Roper, provides information on the family--with a focus on brothers Walt, the poet, and George, the soldier, and their mother--during the Civil War.

Those interested in learning more about the writing career (and love life) of Walt Whitman; the state of hospital care for those suffering from battle wounds; or one American family's experiences during the Civil War period will enjoy this book.