Drum-Taps

Description

Drum-Taps was written during the American Civil War, "put together," as Whitman wrote to a friend, "by fits and starts, on the field, in hospitals as I worked with the soldier boys." As soon as the war ended in 1865, Whitman published the book, which includes some of his tenderest and most haunting poems, along with the great elegy for Lincoln, "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd." All the more extraordinary then that the book as Whitman originally conceived it has not been reprinted in the 150 years since it first came out. Whitman himself decided to break up the sequence when he incorporated the poems into the larger fabric of Leaves of Grass, and in doing so the more personal, urgent, and immediate-diaristic, reportorial, outraged, grief-stricken-character of the original text was obscured. Lawrence Kramer's new, annotated, edition of the first edition of Drum-Taps re-introduces readers to one of Whitman's greatest achievements, a profoundly moving work of witness, courage, and lament.

Walt Whitman (1819-1892) was a great American poet, journalist, and essayist. His work Leaves of Grass, which included a few scattered poems from Drum-Taps, is considered a landmark of American literature. Lawrence Kramer is a pioneering American musicologist and composer and a professor at Fordham University. He has been the editor of the journal 19th-Century Music since 1993 and has written more than ten books on music, most recently Expression and Truth: On the Music of Knowledge. He lives in New York City.

"Incredible as it seems, this is the first new edition-indeed, the first reprinting-of one of the most important books about one of the most important eras by one of the most important authors in American history....the adhesive love of comrades, North and South, is the dominant note of these poems' melody as they mourn the fallen and project the triumph of democracy in America and universally, characteristically in cascades of brilliant, full-color imagery such as none of Whitman's disciples has ever equaled." -Booklist "Elegantly edited... the resurfacing of Drum-Taps for the first time in a century and a half serves as a timely reminder that Whitman was not so much reveling in the carnage of a country divided - a charge leveled at him in recent years - as hoping that, in his poetry, readers would find the moral resources for what needed to come next: national reconstruction, in the most profound sense... the book's republication for the first time in 150 years is an invitation to recognize anew that the America he sang about remains, for better and for worse, our own." -Richard Kreitner, The Boston Globe "The collection now published in its entirety is indispensable...the poems of Drum-Taps reveal a Whitman driven by a new formal intensity, one met, too, by a perhaps more permeable self both stretched and pressurized by his consolatory experience of the war....we can almost hear the sound of the poems in his head." -Jonathan Sturgeon, FlavorWire "Drum-Taps delivers my ambition of the task that has haunted me, namely, to express in a poem...the pending action of this Time & Land we swim in, with all their large conflicting fluctuations of despair & hope, the shiftings, masses, & the whirl & deafening din...& then an undertone of sweetest comradeship and human love, threading its steady thread inside the chaos..." -Walt Whitman, letter to William D. O'Connor, January 6, 1865