Out of them arise active and breathing forms. (Whitman is reminding us here of the opening words of Memoranda, where he tells of the technique he has used to write his book: “Each line, each scrawl, each memorandum, has its history…. Whitman entitled this section of his Memoranda “The Million Dead, Too, Summ’d Up,” using his characteristic contraction-apostrophe, which here creates a haunting ambiguity, because the sentence with all its embedded statistics, its death-data, does give us the Civil War dead summed up, but the contraction also invites us to fill in a few more missing letters, as we realize this death sentence literally summons up the dead, reminding us of their actual physical presence throughout the landscape, north and south, and insisting on their physical emergence in everything that grows from the soil they dissolved into. There is no way, Whitman discovered, to predicate this subject: “The dead in this war.” These numberless dead are of course beyond animation, themselves now fragments of bodies, amputated selves, irretrievable, that have so “saturated” America’s land that we the living are now all fated to reap forevermore a harvest of death, with blood in every grain we eat. And this astonishing catalog of a sentence ends up, after its nearly 400 words, being a sentence fragment. The sentence buries seven parenthetical insertions among its thirty-some dashes, creating a jagged syntactical field sliced with phrasal trenches. We can find pieces of this catalog throughout Whitman’s wartime poetry, but perhaps never so effectively as in this sentence, where he invented a syntax of mass death, an un-diagram-able utterance that wanders the ruined nation to gather up “the infinite dead,” pausing again and again to absorb the horror, the details, the unimaginable numbers of dead young men whose bodies eluded the grave and were composted back into the landscape itself. Instead of using those long lines to absorb an ameliorative, evolving, progressive, expanding self and nation and cosmos into his affirmative song, as he had done in his pre-war editions of Leaves of Grass, he now catalogs mass death. It was a sentence so long that he initially wrote it out as a poem, using his long catalog-lines to tally the dead. Let’s begin Whitman and the Civil War at the end-the end of the Civil War and the end of Walt Whitman’s book of prose recollections called Memoranda During the War, where he writes the longest sentence he would ever compose.
This week's text is "The Million Dead, Too, Summ’d Up"