“Bathed in War's Perfume”: Whitman and the Flag

Abstract

Beginning in 1871 and continuing through 1876 Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass contained a small cluster of poems entitled “Bathed in War's Perfume” that had not appeared in any of the previous four editions and that would disappear from Whitman's final and definitive edition of Leaves in 1881. Taking the American flag as their focus, five of the seven poems in the group had emerged in Whitman's 1865–66 collection of war verse Drum-Taps and Sequel to Drum-Taps. This essay examines the issue of why Whitman created this cluster during the Reconstruction years only to disassemble it in 1881, and it also investigates the idea of the flag itself in Whitman's war and Reconstruction poetry. What did the flag mean to Whitman during those significant years of change in his own, and the nation's, life?