Poet and Civil War nurse, Walt Whitman assembled lists of expressions for grief, suffering, and compassion to help formulate his poems of the Civil War. His Drum-Taps, the most important book of poetry to emerge from the war period, included accounts of calls to arms and of the personal heroism and comradeship of battlefields and encampments. At the book’s core was “The Wound-Dresser,” Whitman’s somber testament to the terrible afflictions of men in army hospitals and the quiet courage of those who cared for them. In his elegiac “Ashes of Soldiers,” the notes for which are shown in Whitman’s hand, the poet mourned the dead from all regions of the country and captured the high cost in sorrow paid to preserve unity.