| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Better Angel: Walt Whitman in the Civil War. By Roy Morris Jr. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. x, 270 pp. $25.00, ISBN 0-19-512482-0.)

The Civil War years, Roy Morris Jr. argues in this elegiac portrait, tested Walt Whitman "physically, spiritually, and artistically"—and "it proved him." His service to the wounded of North and South in the hospitals of Washington, D.C., caught him as he had began to stagnate and defined his later years as a poet. 1

The book begins as the war does and assumes a fair amount of previous knowledge about Whitman's life to that date. Morris's intention is to focus specifically on Whitman's war, in a depth no previous biographer has matched, while at the same time putting "a human face on a most inhuman tragedy." Along the way Morris digresses only to illustrate the context: he identifies the battles and their effects, the diseases rampant, the shape and cleanliness of the wards themselves, and some of the relevant political struggles ongoing around Whitman. The reader sees Washington all around them, in all its tawdry, bustling tragedy. . . .

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