휘트먼의 남북전쟁 시에 나타난 해상전투 읽기

A Reading of Walt Whitman’s Ocean Battles in Civil War Poetry

The purpose of this paper is to explore Walt Whitman’s poems related to the ocean and the ‘American Civil War’ (1861-65). It centrally describes the wreck of the C. S. S. Alabama, a Confederate ship which was sunk during the desperate years of the Civil War, and illuminates how Whitman reveals his poetic imagination in his own poems connected to these ocean battles. He says that one theme for ever-enduring poets is war and the genius of poets is the making of perfect soldiers. His ocean poems reveal the heroic chant of all intrepid sailors, and also harmony and reconciliation between the dead and the living in the sea and between the North and the South after the Civil War. Ocean or sea battles were less known to people than the battles on land. Therefore, we can understand Whitman’s war poems better by analyzing his poems related to ocean battles.