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His admirers called Walt Whitman (1819‑1892) ‘the old gray’. But
by his own estimation he was more black‑and‑white: ‘I am as bad
as the worst, but thank God I am as good as the best’. And it was
while studying the worst that I ruffled – a student of 20 – through
Mark Van Doren’s The Portable Walt Whitman to find this:

   One young New York man, with a bright, handsome face, had
   been lying several months from a most disagreeable wound,
   receiv’d at Bull Run. a bullet had shot him right through the
   bladder, hitting him front, low in the belly, and coming out back.
   He had suffer’d much – the water came out of the wound, by
   slow but steady quantities, for many weeks – so that he lay almost
   constantly in a sort of puddle…

   This is Specimen Days: a composite of us civil war reportage
made during 600 visits to Washington hospitals; of prosaic
‘embryons’ of a large nature poem, and of biographical observations
by the poet – then a stroke victim in his 60’s.
  
    The poised hysteria of the WW1 poets always stank of theatrical
cant to me, but the unexpectedness of any poet doing something
modest, practical and (above all) generous made me read Specimen
Days with the unchained sympathy of adolescence.
  
   John Mahoy’s ‘bright, handsome face’ appears 46 pages and
15 miserable months later, only to die. Whitman (a devotee of
devastating codicils) adds that the boy was bought up an orphan and
signed over to a ‘tyrannical master’ in Sullivan City ‘…the scars of
whose cowhide and club remain’d yet on his back’.
  
   At 20 I’d accepted that poets had to adopt stupid postures to get
their effects: but I hadn’t before considered how that might benefit
their prose. There are sentences here, contemptuous of grammar,
which glide like pythons full of tin cans and that hint at the famous
free verse.
  
   But while I adore Walt’s un‑modern lack of fear at expressing
himself to the brim, the fascination of Specimen Days is the way it
flexes between his inherent ripeness and the lean particularity of his
war reportage (as he says of a war‑scalded veteran: ‘the superfluous
flesh of talking is long work’d off him, and he gives little but the hard
meat and sinew’).
  
   The depth of the book’s keel owes as much to the accreted
sense of history as it does to the gravity of war, and I wonder if I
ever fully read the latter half (I doubt it).
  
   The nature notes are intended as a healing balm to martial
horrors. Did I mention the men pinned to the ground with
bayonets? The soldiers hamstrung from trees? The celebrated ‘heap
of amputated limbs’ outside the first hospital that Whitman visits?
All of them narrated coolly. Set against this is ‘the reedy trill of the
robin… the cheery notes of my old acquaintance Tommy Quail…
and the twangy meoeow of the cat bird’.
  
   For all the ‘Adamic air bathing’ in his ’secluded little dell’, Walt
patently isn’t fired up by Nature in the way that he wants to be. The
pastoral descriptions are mostly baggy balloons.
  
   The book’s biographical elements, too, struggle now to avoid
being sucked into fossil mud. Walt struggled desperately to be a
man of his time, and here pays the price. His description of the
British Isles might almost be prophetic (‘the red tape, the fatuity, the
flunkeyism everywhere’): but I rankle at his chauvinism. It is severely
at odds with what I once thought to be a Quaker’s non‑partisan
disdain for conflict.
  
   Whitman is conciliatory to the South, but this is no more than
small change for the patriotic goal of Union. He allows himself
a swipe at the hellish prison camp of Andersonville: ‘it steeps its
perpetrators in blackest, escapeless, endless damnation’ – and you
wonder what the patriot could have said about Abu Ghraib.
  
   Did I think Walt’s excessive tenderness – ‘the kiss I gave
him as I was about leaving he return’d fourfold’ – was solely
humanitarianism? Did I not wonder why this enthusiast for ‘manly
attachment’ so repeatedly described moonlit urban scenes? The ‘old
gay’ was cruising, basically. Mark Van Doren never fired a truer shot when he compared the ‘190lbs’ poet to a ‘bear’! It seems Walt even proposed setting up a domestic threesome with two of his hospital charges (one of them called, curiously, Tom Sawyer).
  
   Specimen Days gains impetus where the reader mistakes Walt’s
solicitings for solicitousness, and his sexual opportunism for nonpartisanship.  I don’t doubt he was anything but kind and honest: but virtues don’t have to be selfless, and he wasn’t quite the ‘great heart’ I imagined.
  
   Mind, I still think that no other wartime record leapfrogs history
so cleanly.

   Today poets weigh wars from in front of their TV screens: often
damnatory, but nonetheless directed by the dazzle. It might have
been partly unwitting, but Whitman’s sexual urges left a compelling
insight into our species’ ongoing stupidity – because to a Martian, all
human wars are civil wars.