Stephen Crane and Walt Whitman: The Nature and Language of Social Protest Although Stephen Crane was never a soldier in his short life, his novel The Red Badge of Courage has been praised by Civil War veterans and veterans of more recent wars not only for its historical accuracy but for its ability to capture the psychological evolution of those on the battlefield (Heizberg xvi) . Walt Whitman, on the other hand, served as a field medic during the Civil War. Perhaps he was exposed daily to the most gruesome aspects of war: the primitive medical techniques, the wounded, the sick, the dying and the dead. From his experiences came a collection of poems, “Drum Taps,” describing the horrors he had witnessed and America had suffered. As literary artists, a wide gulf of structure and style separates Crane and Whitman. Their shared cultural experience, the legacy of the Civil War, connects them, bridging the darkness, allowing them, unilaterally, to dispel notions of glorious battles and heroic, honorable deaths. Examining Crane's Henry Fleming and the Doctor from Whitman's poem of the same name, both key literary differences and essential thematic consistencies emerge. In The Red Badge of Courage, Henry Fleming was drawn to enlist by his childhood dreams. His highly romanticized notion of war was eclectic, borrowing from various classical and medieval sources. However, his exalted, almost deified, conception of the life of a soldier in retirement and in combat began to deflate before the ink on his enlistment signature had even dried. Soon the army ceased to possess all the personal characteristics that Henry had once imagined, becoming a reckless, dispas... middle of paper... Eds. New York: W. W. Norton, 1962. Hartwick, Harry. The foreground of American fiction. New York: American Book Co, 1934, p. 17-44 Rpt to Crane, Stephen. The red badge of courage. Sculley Bradley, Richard Beatty and E. Hudson Long Eds. New York: W. W. Norton, 1962. Schroeder, John W. "Stephen Crane Embattled," University of Kansas City Review, XVII (Winter 1950), 119 Rpt. in Crane, Stephen. The red badge of courage. Sculley Bradley, Richard Beatty and E. Hudson Long Eds. New York: W. W. Norton, 1962. Walcutt, C. C. American Literary Naturalism, A Divided Stream. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1952, p.66-82 Rpt in Crane, Stephen. The red badge of courage. Sculley Bradley, Richard Beatty and E. Hudson Long Eds. New York: W. W. Norton, 1962. Whitman, Walt. Leaves of grass. New York: Bantam Books, 1983.