Critical Essay | Critical Essay by James Dougherty

Critical Essay by James Dougherty

SOURCE: "Satan, Wound-Dresser, Witness," in Walt Whitman and the Citizen 's Eye, Louisiana State University Press, 1993, pp. 76-107.

In the following essay, Dougherty assesses Whitman 's Drum-Taps, maintaining that while the poetry in the volume is similar in some ways to Whitman's pre-Civil War poetry, Drum-Taps also represents a sense of loss—not only a loss of faith in "physical and spiritual regeneration, " but also the poet's loss of faith in his "original poetic."

"Cavalry Crossing a Ford," from Drum-Taps, offers just such a visual image:

A line in long array where they wind betwixt green islands,
They take a serpentine course, their arms flash in the sun—hark to the musical clank,
Behold the silvery river, in it the splashing horses loitering stop to drink,
Behold the brown-faced men, each group, each person, a picture, the negligent rest on the saddles,
Some emerge on the opposite bank, others are just entering the...
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