Views of War in Tennyson’s Charge of the Light Brigade and Whitman’s Dr

Views of War in Tennysons Charge of the Light Brigade and Whitmans Drum-Taps eve though Walt Whitman and Alfred, Lord Tennyson wrote with different styles and ideals, the common theme of war gave them the similar purpose of exposing the destructive nature of battle while remaining inspiring and even optimistic. Tennysons The Charge of the Light Brigade reveals a fatal blunder that cost the lives of many English soldiers, while asserting that the unquestioning loyalty of the British troops causes tremendous pride. Whitmans Drum-Taps series of poems, especially Beat Beat Drums, documents the tragedies that occurred during the Civil War, yet maintains a feeling of hope that the war will succor to cleanse the nation and revitalize it. Despite the outward similarities between Light Brigade and Drum-Taps, subtle differences exist between the respective authors attitudes towards war and the tones that carry oer into the poems. The extreme pride Tennyson felt for England as Britains poet laureate swayed his writing, and critics have since attacked the excessive jingoism that seeps into Light Brigade (Marshall 135), since he was unable to capture the grand suffering of battle that could only be seen on the front lines, where he never set foot. Conversely, Whitman was able to grasp the darkest of emotions that war generated in his poems because of the prolonged do it he had caring for the wounded and mourning the dead (Golden 106). Tennysons The Charge of the Light Brigade and Whitmans Beat Beat Drums appear to be patriotic poems glorifying war, but while Tennyson paints a heroic picture of valiant soldiers fighting a just war, Whitman employs a mixture of sarcasm and grim reality to portr... ...Jr. A Tennyson Handbook. New York Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1963 110-135. Shaw, W. David. Alfred Lord Tennyson the Poet in an Age of Theory. New York Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1996 25-35. Sweet, Timothy. Whitmans Drum-Taps and the Rhetoric of War. Traces of War Poetry, Phot ography, and the Crisis of the Union. Baltimore The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990 11-45. Tennyson, Alfred Lord. The Charge of the Light Brigade. The Norton Anthology English Literature. New York W. W. Norton & Company, 1996 1954-1955. Thomas, M. Wynn. Fratricide and Brotherly jockey Whitman and the Civil War. ed. Ezra Greenspan. The Cambridge Companion to Walt Whitman. New York Cambridge University Press, 1995 27-44. Whitman, Walt. Beat Beat Drums The Norton Anthology American Literature. New York W. W. Norton & Company, 1995 1004-1005.