Note: Presenting via Zoom as part of the Smithsonian Associates program.

When Confederate troops fired on Fort Sumter in April of 1861, Walt Whitman declared it "the volcanic upheaval of the nation”­—the inception of a war that would dramatically alter the shape and character of American culture. Prior to the war, America's leading writers had been integral to helping the young nation imagine itself, assert its beliefs, and realize its immense potential. When the Civil War erupted, it confronted them with the brutal reality of death on the battlefield as well as the disintegration of the symbolic order they had helped to create. The war demanded new frameworks for understanding the world and new forms of communication that could engage with the immensity of the conflict. It fostered both social and cultural experimentation.

Scholar Randall Fuller uses Whitman as a case study to trace the changes in his poetry from idealism to realism, from exuberant democratic celebration to a more chastened view of America as a place where enormous suffering had occurred. Fuller is the Herman Melville Distinguished Professor of 19th-Century American Literature at the University of Kansas.