Walt Whitman 
The Wound Dresser 

The Wound-Dresser is one of Walt Whitman's most popular poem, published in 1865 in his collection Drum Taps. It is a personal, graphic, and absolutely moving poem that centres on the theme of nursing the sick and dying and gives a realistic view of war and the unexciting side of what happens to the men who go to the fight it. This poem is extraordinary for its lack of extreme portrayals of pain and suffering. The poem features Whitman's experiences during the Civil War as a volunteer in Washington's hospitals. The Wound Dresser is then, a poem of the Civil War, a poem of our country's history, a poem of the poet's 'specimen interior', a poem based in Washington D.C., and a poem that reviews 'the narrow of the tragedy' that is war. It is a poem of remembering, of memory, of memory reviewed through dream. This is a remarkable collection of articles and letters about Walt Whitman's skills volunteering as a nurse in the Civil War. In the book, there is three articles. The articles tell about his time in the Civil War and many of his experiences with injured soldiers he met.