“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 Commonwealth

February 24, 1866

“Like many of our best poets, however, he is too wilful, and does not conform himself with sufficient patience to the laws of rhythm and proportion in thought or expression. Consequently he is fitfully great, and pleases only at intervals in the details of his composition. He is often as tiresome as Wordsworth in his dull passages, and as rugged as an old English metrical romance. He is full of other faults, too, but they mostly spring from his wilfulness and impatience of rules. The complaints made of his earlier poems, that they were coarse and immoral in passages, will not apply to this little volume, which is as free from reproach on this score as Mr. Harlan’s hymn-book. It will do much, we are confident, to remove the prejudice against Mr. Whitman in many minds, and to secure him that place in literature during his lifetime which he is sure to hold in the next age.”

Franklin Benjamin Sanborn

The Round Table

November 11, 1865

“So long, then, as Mr. Whitman chooses to stop at mere consciousness, he cannot be called a true poet. We all have consciousness; but we ask of art an utterance. We do not so much care in what way we get this expression; we will take it in ecstatic prose, though we think it is better subjected to the laws of prosody, since every good thing is subject to some law; but the expression we must have. Often, in spite of himself, Mr. Whitman grants it in this volume, and there is some hope that he will hereafter grant it more and more. There are such rich possibilities in the man that it is lamentable to contemplate his error of theory. He has truly and thoroughly absorbed the idea of our American life, and we say to him as he says to himself, “You’ve got enough in you, Walt; why don’t you get it out?” A man’s greatness is good for nothing folded up in him, and if emitted in barbaric yawps, it is not more filling than Ossian2 or the east wind.”

William Dean Howells

Watson’s Weekly Art Journal

November 4, 1865

“As an artist—that is, as one who gives a complete and harmonious externalization to his feeling—Mr. Whitman is much inferior to Mr. Ward. Still the poet may be said to be more truly artistic than if he were more ostensibly so. He sets out to assert himself—the conscious American life as superior to restrictions of time and place, as all-containing, all-sanctifying. His inartistic looseness of style and expression is quite consistent with this mood. The poet, in consequence, presents himself to the mind as a more congruous and artistic whole than if he had modeled his verse in accordance with all the unities of Art.”

Anonymous

Sequel To Drum-Taps

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