The Two Whitmans

Cornelius Eady: “The Wound Dresser,” by Walt Whitman. On, on I go. Open doors of time, open hospital doors, the crushed head I dress. Poor crazed hand, tear not the bandage away. The neck of the cavalryman with the bullet through and through I examine. Hard the breathing rattles, quite glazed already the eye, yet life struggles hard. Come sweet death. Be persuaded. Oh, beautiful death. In mercy come quickly.

Cornelius Eady: From the stump of the arm, the amputated hand, I undo the clotted lint, remove the slough, wash off the matter and blood. Back on his pillow the soldier bends with curved neck and side falling head. His eyes are closed. His face is pale. He dares not look on the bloody stump, and has not yet looked on it. I dress a wound in the side, deep, deep. But a day or two more, for see the frame all wasted and sinking, and the yellow blue countenance see.

Cornelius Eady: I dress the perforated shoulder, the foot with the bullet wound. Clean the one with a gnawing and putrid gangrene, so sickening, so offensive, while the attendant stands behind beside me holding the tray and pail. I am faithful. I do not give out. The fractured thigh, the knee, the wound in the abdomen, these and more I dress with impassive hand, yet deep in my breast a fire, a burning flame.

Cornelius Eady: Now if that’s not the cosmos’ one of roughs, right? You can see how tender those lines are. To me, there’s two Whitmans. There the bombastic, cosmic loudmouth who bounces around the world and declares all these things, and that’s who he invents in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. If you open the 1855 edition, you saw this character that was this guy, with the shirt open and the cocky hat tipped, right? With his hands on shoulder, like what are you doing? What are you looking at? Yeah, I’m a poet, what do you think? It’s that kind of stance. And that to him is his idea of a persona, his idea of American persona. One of the poems he writes for himself, he says that he recognizes no annihilation or death or loss of identity. That’s that guy, right? Someone who doesn’t deal with death.

Cornelius Eady: Well, he sees at the hospitals the suffering and the amputations and the agonies that are going on, and that changes him into the second Walt Whitman, the Walt Whitman who isn’t bombastic, who doesn’t think he’s better or bigger than death. He touches death, and death touches him, and it really changes the way he looks at the world from that point on. The obstructions are all gone. It’s really straightforward. He’s unblinking. It’s still lyric. It’s still beautiful. You still hear the sort of declaration, almost sermonistic kind of tone to the lines, but they’re quieter, so much quieter now, so much more attentive, and he’s paying attention to something else other than himself.

Ed Ayers: That’s Cornelius Eady. He’s a poet, professor of English at SUNY Stony Brook Southampton, and the editor of the Southampton Review.