Walt Whitman: The Hospital Years

Walt Whitman has often been quoted on the Civil War, but few realize the extent to which he worked with the soldiers to get their message out to loved ones, so that they wouldn't be lost or forgotten. Yet another letter has turned up, which Whitman ghostwrote for a soldier after the war to let his loved ones know he was still alive.

It all started with his younger brother, who was felled in the Battle of Fredericksburg in 1862. Whitman would spend the next three years tended to the fallen soldiers. Given that many of these soldiers were illiterate or simply didn't have paper and pen to write a letter, Whitman was a godsend for these men, as he would visit the hospitals in Washington, DC, everyday and connect with them anyway he could.

His thoughts and letters were captured in Drum Taps and Memoranda During the War, but there was much more. Angel Price offers a nice essay on the time Whitman spent at Washington's Civil War Hospitals. Little wonder Whitman still remains are foremost American poet.

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Dylan in America

Whoever it was in 1969 who named the very first Bob Dylan bootleg album “Great White Wonder” may have had a mischievous streak. There are any number of ways you can interpret the title — most boringly, the cover was blank, like the Beatles’ “White Album” — but I like to see a sly allusion to “Moby-Dick.” In the seven years since the release of his first commercial record, Dylan had become the white whale of 20th-century popular song, a wild, unconquerable and often baffling force of musical nature who drove fans and critics Ahab-mad in their efforts to spear him, lash him to the hull and render him merely comprehensible. --- Bruce Handy, NYTimes ____________________________________________ I figured we can start fresh with Bob Dylan. Couldn't resist this photo of him striking a Woody Guthrie pose. Looks like only yesterday. Here is a link to the comments building up to this reading group.

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''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005

Dispatches from Vilnius

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