Whitman's "Word of the Modern" and the First Modern War

Abstract

Lincoln accomplished what few other Americans of the day could manage; in the face of the Civil War's most terrible effects, Lincoln offered no qualification for placing the War within a providential vision of American history. Standing at Gettysburg, on the ground where, just four months before, over 50,000 men had fallen in three days of battle, Lincoln affirmed without equivocation that the blood which soaked the ground had consecrated the nation's rebirth. In The Unwritten War, Daniel Aaron describes the doubts and conflicts which plagued the leading authors of the day, preventing, as Aaron argues, anyone from producing the long hoped for national epic-the American Paradise Lost. In particular, Aaron suggests, writers like Herman Melville, Mark Twain, and Henry Adams feared that the North as well as the South had been destroyed by the war. In their writings one sees the founders' dream usurped by a mechanized mass society and ruthless capitalism. Many Northerners, Aaron suggests, in the years after the war, found themselves in increasing sympathy with the rebel figure as they became increasingly alienated from an imperial United States. 1 Walt Whitman shared more fully Lincoln's vision of the war as necessary to the preservation and affirmation of the democratic union he cherished. Critics have rightfully emphasized Whitman's celebration of the war's democratic force, but have largely ignored a powerful, if often sub textual , fear and resistance voiced in the war poems and proseparenthetical, denied, hidden-but expressing the possible threats the war posed to democracy. Whitman's vision of America remains intact, but ultimately this wholeness is earned not by ignoring the war's dangers, but by giving them voice and counterbalancing them with the redemptive powers Whitman did find released by the war. At the heart of this struggle is Whitman's concept of the "en masse." In his first edition of Leaves of Grass, Whitman proclaimed: Endless unfolding of words of ages! And mine a word of the modern .... a word en masse. 2