Was Walt Whitman ever in the war?

Answer 1

He lived through the Civil War but he was never involved in any battles. Whitman was opposed to the war and everything associated with it (i.e. slavery). His poetry reflects that rather well.

He devoted an entire section of "Leaves of Grass" to war poems. Check out some of his work at the links below.

http://www.bartleby.com/142/110.html
http://www.bartleby.com/142/121.html
http://www.bartleby.com/142/122.html
http://www.bartleby.com/142/123.html
http://www.bartleby.com/142/124.html
http://www.bartleby.com/142/128.html

These are just a few examples. There are dozens more.

Happy reading

Answer 2

No, he was never a combatant, but . . .

""I go around among these sights, among the crowded hospitals doing what I can, yet it is a mere drop in the bucket. . . the path I follow, I suppose I may say, is my own."1 The unique path which Walt Whitman followed during the American Civil War (1861-1865) led to an insightful, poetic record which captures the turmoil of this era on an intimate level. Like all transformational events in history one must examine the literature of the time to reach an understanding of the day- to-day effects on common people. Unlike other wars, no major author was a military participant in the Civil War. Yet there were authors who had personal interaction with soldiers and experienced important events of the war. Herman Melville went on scouting rides in order to get a glimpse of the soldier's lifestyle before writing his Battle Pieces and Aspects of War. Louisa May Alcott published Hospital Sketches (1863) after a brief time as nurse during December 1862 and January 1863. Her work was cut short when she became ill with typhoid fever and returned home.

Besides firsthand diaries of soldiers, the most poignant scenes of the Civil War come from Walt Whitman's wartime prose and most distinctly his book of poetry entitled Drum Taps (1865) Many of its poems resulted from his years in Washington, D.C., spent as a psychological nurse to sick and wounded soldiers. Whitman wrote to a friend in 1863, "The doctors tell me I supply the patients with a medicine which all their drugs & bottles & powders are helpless to yield" in reference to the aid of his cheerful disposition and careful attention to the welfare of the soldiers.2

During these hospital years Whitman was known to be constantly scribbling in little notebooks made of pieced together scraps of paper. These now prized notebooks are filled with bits of poetry, addresses of friends and notes concerning the needs of the wounded soldiers. The material in these notebooks is priceless to modern scholars' understanding of Whitman's experiences during the war. In one such notebook Whitman writes, "The expression of American personality through this war is not to be looked for in the great campaign, & the battle-fights. It is to be looked for . . . in the hospitals, among the wounded.
It was in these hospitals, and not on the battlefields, as some of the poems perhaps suggest, that Whitman's work in Drum Taps was inspired. He brought to life the emotions and realities of the Civil War. Whitman was in his forties when the war began and did not participate as a soldier. Two of Whitman's brothers did, however, join the Union Army. Andrew Jackson Whitman served only briefly but George Washington Whitman fought with the Fifty-first Regiment of New York Volunteers for most of the war. When George was wounded in the Battle of Fredericksburg in December 1862, Whitman made the trip to the nation's capital and then to Falmouth, Virginia, across the Rappahanock River from Fredericksburg to find and care for his brother. George was only slightly wounded, but Walt's errand of mercy would forever change his outlook on the war and life.

When Whitman arrived at the front and climbed the river bank to the Lacy House, a makeshift military hospital, his first sight was "a heap of feet, legs, arms, and human fragments, cut bloody, black and blue, swelled and sickening . . ."4 Despite such grotesque scenes, he quickly became engrossed in the passion and pathos of the wartime hospitals. He remained in camp with George for eight or nine days and spent much of his time at the field hospital. In his diary of December 26, 1862, he writes, "Death is nothing here. As you step out in the morning from your tent to wash your face you see before you on a stretcher a shapeless extended object, and over it is thrown a dark grey blanket-- it is the corpse of some wounded or sick soldier of the reg't who died in the hospital tent during the night-- perhaps there is a row of three or four of these corpses lying covered over."5

His compassionate nature was quickly overrun with a desire to help these wounded men. On December 28 Whitman left the camp at Falmouth with a trainload of wounded soldiers bound for Washington, D.C. Upon arrival in Washington he visited his friends, the O'Connors, with the intention to remain in the city for only a week to visit some hospitalized soldiers from Brooklyn. However, he quickly realized that he could not leave his new found and suffering comrades and return to his life in Brooklyn, which now seemed meaningless in comparison. He found a job in the Army Paymaster's Office working a few hours a day. For the next three years he kept almost constant company with wounded soldiers and spent his small salary on food, gifts and tobacco for the lonely patients in wards all around Washington. He remained throughout the war, doing the best he could to be a friend to these forgotten men. William Douglas O'Connor wrote of Whitman's hospital service in The Good Gray Poet (1866), suggesting that Whitman had grown gray in the service of his country: "His theory is that these men, far from home, lonely, sick at heart, need more than anything some practical token that they are not forsaken."

For more, please use the link below.

Answer 3

yeah