Looking back on the Civil War in his 1882 “Specimen Days & Collect,” Walt Whitman reflected that “the real war will never get in the books.” He had tried, in “Drum-Taps” (1865), a collection of poems forged in harrowing personal experience. Whitman had gone to the front in December 1862, when his brother George was wounded at Fredericksburg. Outside a field hospital, Whitman found a heap of amputated limbs—enough, he recorded, to fill “a one-horse cart.” His weeks with the Union army changed his life. In January 1863 he moved to Washington and began volunteering in the military hospitals. A notebook he carried that year contains drafts of one of his finest poems, the Civil War elegy “Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night.”

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