“Drum-Taps” – Initial Reception

The score(s) next to each publication’s review and the average rating is an interpretation of the reviews by Literature’s Pretty Long History.

Critics:

Drum-Taps

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The Broadway

November 1867

“He is the voice of which America stood most in need—a voice at which ladies scream and gigmen titter, but which clearly pertains to a man who means to be heard. He is the clear forerunner of the great American poet, long longed for, often prophesied, but not perhaps to be beheld till the vast American democracy has subsided a little from its last and grandest struggle. Honour in his generation is of course his due, but he does not seem to solicit honour. He is too thoroughly alive to care about being tickled into activity, too excited already to be much moved by finding himself that most badgered of functionaries, the recognized Sir Oracle.”

Robert Williams Buchanan

The North American Review

January 1867

“The pieces of which “Drum-Taps” consists are in form, like those in “Leaves of Grass,” neither blank verse nor rhythmical prose. A poet of genuine artistic power would suffer from the absence of those restraints which are to genius what its banks are to a river,—limitations that aid in the development of beauty and of force; and Mr. Whitman is so far from being an artist, that he boasts of his lack of culture, after the fashion of “self-made” men. Yet it is precisely this deficiency which disguises his real excellence, and stands between him and the fame he predicts for himself. A writer whose works are to live must have taste to discriminate between what is worth saying in a given poem, and what is not worth saying, and must have courage to excise the latter. The business of cataloguing the works of creation should be left to the auctioneer. Poets of vastly more genius and culture than Mr. Whitman possesses have committed the error of thinking all objects and fancies equally worthy of a poem.”

A. S. Hill

Galaxy

December 1, 1866

“It seems to us that Walt Whitman possesses almost in excess, a quality in which every current poet is lacking. We mean the faculty of being in entire sympathy with nature, and the objects and shows of nature, and of rude, abysmal man; and appalling directness of utterance therefrom, without any intermediate agency or modification.”

John Burroughs

The Radical

April 1866

““Drum-Taps” contains but few strikingly different characteristics from the author’s former volume. We are pleased to find that certain features of that are not introduced in this; for we are compelled to confess that there were certain pages of the “Leaves of Grass” which we regretted had been written. We have written upon the fly-leaf of our copy this passage from “The Essays:” “Osmand had a humanity so broad and deep, that although his speech was so bold and free with the Koran as to disgust all the dervishes, yet was there never a poor outcast, eccentric or insane man, some fool who had cut off his beard, or who had been mutilated under a vow, or had a pet madness in his brain, but fled at once to him: that great heart lay there so sunny and hospitable in the centre of the country, that it seemed as if the instinct of all sufferers drew them to his side.””

B.

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Sequel To Drum-Taps

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The North American Review

January 1867

“The pieces of which “Drum-Taps” consists are in form, like those in “Leaves of Grass,” neither blank verse nor rhythmical prose. A poet of genuine artistic power would suffer from the absence of those restraints which are to genius what its banks are to a river,—limitations that aid in the development of beauty and of force; and Mr. Whitman is so far from being an artist, that he boasts of his lack of culture, after the fashion of “self-made” men. Yet it is precisely this deficiency which disguises his real excellence, and stands between him and the fame he predicts for himself. A writer whose works are to live must have taste to discriminate between what is worth saying in a given poem, and what is not worth saying, and must have courage to excise the latter. The business of cataloguing the works of creation should be left to the auctioneer. Poets of vastly more genius and culture than Mr. Whitman possesses have committed the error of thinking all objects and fancies equally worthy of a poem.”

A. S. Hill

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