“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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Brooklyn Daily Union

November 23, 1865

“Mr. Whitman will hardly be a poet in this world if “Drum Taps” are his best; and we doubt if any man who could be guilty of some of these can be a poet in any world where harmony and beauty in thought and expression are attributes of poetry”

Anonymous

The New York Times

November 22, 1865

“Mr. WHITMAN has strong aspirations toward poetry, but he is wanting entirely in the qualities that PRAED possessed in such large measure. He has no ear, no sense of the melody of verse. His poems only differ from prose in the lines being cut into length, instead of continuously pointed. As prose, they must be gauged by the sense they contain, the mechanism of verse being either despised by, or out of the reach of the writer. Considered as prose, then, we find in them a poverty of thought, paraded forth with a hubbub of stray words, and accompanied with a vehement self-assertion in the author, that betrays an absence of true and calm confidence in himself and his impulses. Mr. WHITMAN has fortunately better claims on the gratitude of his countrymen than any he will ever derive from his vocation as a poet. What a man does, is of far greater consequence than what he says or prints, and his devotion to the most painful of duties in the hospitals at Washington during the war, will confer honor on his memory when Leaves of Grass are withered and Drum Taps have ceased to vibrate.”

Anonymous

Sequel To Drum-Taps

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