“Camera to the World”: Walt Whitman’s Photobiographic Representation of the Civil War

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Among the American writers of the nineteenth century who participated in the Civil War, Whitman is believed to be a poet who had an artistic inclination toward photography. Throughout his writings of the Civil War, Whitman explicitly reveals his status as a poet-photographer, stating “The great poet is he who performs the office of the camera to the world.” Significantly, Whitman’s references and implications for photography can be easily found everywhere in his wartime writings.
For Whitman, writing is to visually catch and deliver the “knack of catching life on the run, in a flash, as it shifted, moved, evolved” like photography. Since Whitman rarely saw the actual battle scenes from the battlefront, he could learn to see the scenes only through the soldiers who participated in the war or the images of the photographers who followed the troops. Thus, Whitman had to take the war photographs taken by the pioneer photographers such as Brady and Gardner to write poems and memoranda for “the real war” which spread out on the battlefield more effectively. Given that he attempts to realistically deliver the battle scenes by “trying to photograph a tempest,” the Civil War sections in Whitman’s autobiography Specimen Days are considered the results of his photographic representation.
Above all, the Civil War sections in Specimen Days explicitly reveal the photobiographic representation in relation to Whitman’s favorite photographer Alexander Gardner. Undeniably, Whitman successfully incorporates “the real atmosphere of a battle” inspired from Gardner’s Civil War photographs into his texts. Thus, it is not surprising that Gardner’s photographs such as A Burial Party, Cold Harbor, VA. and A Harvest of Death are in perfect accord with Whitman’s visually evocative language in Specimen Days. In this regard, Specimen Days should be considered a photobiography which has an inseparable connection with Gardner’s photographs.

참고문헌 (Reference)

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