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A Re-reading of Walt Whitman's Civil War Poetry

Walt Whitman writes that the entire work revolves around the four years war, and claims that the "Drum-Taps" cluster of Leaves of Grass is pivotal to the rest of the text. Though Whitman had viewed himself as a poet-prophet in the prewar, during the war years he came to see himself as a kind of poet-historian. I suggested that his ultimate purpose of the Civil War poems is to mention war itself and his war poems and the war are one. But during and after the Civil War, his war poems reveal harmony and reconciliation between the victory and the defeat and also between the North and the South. Whitman's Civil War poems show the process of recovery of humanitarian love and forgiveness and reconciliation between the dead and the living. After the carnage of the Civil War, Whitman wished for the reunification and prosperity of his own country.