Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Notes on Contributors
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Part I Contexts
- Part II Genres
- Part III Figures
- 12 Walt Whitman
- 13 War and the Art of Writing: Emily Dickinson's Relational Aesthetics
- 14 Herman Melville and the Civilian Author
- 15 Looking at Lincoln
- 16 Frederick Douglass, Violence, and Abraham Lincoln
- 17 Mary Boykin Chesnut: Epic and Miniature
- 18 Mark Twain
- 19 Replay: William Faulkner and the Civil War
- 20 Robert Penn Warren's Civil War
- 21 Natasha Trethewey's Civil War
- 22 Afterword: Archiving the War
- Recommendations for Further Reading
- Index
12 - Walt Whitman
from Part III - Figures
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 December 2015
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Notes on Contributors
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Part I Contexts
- Part II Genres
- Part III Figures
- 12 Walt Whitman
- 13 War and the Art of Writing: Emily Dickinson's Relational Aesthetics
- 14 Herman Melville and the Civilian Author
- 15 Looking at Lincoln
- 16 Frederick Douglass, Violence, and Abraham Lincoln
- 17 Mary Boykin Chesnut: Epic and Miniature
- 18 Mark Twain
- 19 Replay: William Faulkner and the Civil War
- 20 Robert Penn Warren's Civil War
- 21 Natasha Trethewey's Civil War
- 22 Afterword: Archiving the War
- Recommendations for Further Reading
- Index
Summary
In 1886, in an effort to secure financial support for the aging poet Walt Whitman, a group of his friends and supporters considered petitioning the government to award Whitman a pension in recognition of his service in the Union hospitals during the Civil War. Seeking the poet's approval for such a course, an associate wrote to him in December 1886, assuring him that “The Nation is deeply in your debt for the services you rendered during the war, not to mention its deeper debt to you as a poet which will be appreciated more and more as the years go on … an influential member of committee on invalid pensions, tells me that you are fully entitled to a pension and that he will be very glad to be instrumental in securing it.” The poet responded immediately, expressing his gratitude, but stating, “I … do not consent to being an applicant for a pension … I do not deserve it.”
In spite of the poet's refusal, talk of the plan spread, and it soon became fodder for the escalating controversy over Civil War pensions and provided ammunition to some of the poet's detractors. In March 1887, author and veteran Thomas Wentworth Higginson took up the issue in an article “Women and Men. War Pensions for Women.” As scholars have long recognized, the author's target was clearly Whitman:
There were many men who, being rejected from enlistment for physical defects, sought honorably to serve their country as hospital nurses or agents of the Sanitary Commission. A beginning has been made in the way of pensioning these men in the case of the proposed pension for Mr. Whitman, the poet; although he he [sic], is not wholly an instance in point, having been a man of conspicuously fine physique, but who deliberately preferred to serve in the hospital rather than the field … There are hundreds of men who were in the war what General Bragg, with unusual frankness, called “the rubbish of the army,” who now find it, in view of recent pension legislation, profitable to be poor, and picturesque to be worthless. Worse than this, there are many estimable persons whom a single twinge of rheumatism starts on the same downward track. I confess myself reluctant to see a similar temptation held out to either poets or women.
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- A History of American Civil War Literature , pp. 181 - 194Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2015