Great Regular: This week's poem, Vigil Strange I Kept in the Field One Night

is from his 1864 volume, Drum-Taps. Published almost a decade after the first edition of Leaves of Grass (1855), it reflects the intense maturation process he underwent during the American civil war, and demonstrates how technically radical Whitman is, or seems to be. His punctuation is often weird. His lines seem to rush headlong till stopped, usually by a semi-colon. His word order may be quaint with Latinate inversions ("Long there and then in vigil I stood") and sometimes ungrammatical; his lines expand and contract like tides.

from Carol Rumens: The Guardian: Poem of the week: Vigil Strange I Kept in the Field One Night by Walt Whitman

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