"Walt Whitman, Radical Patriot" 2005. Victoria Hall Theatre, Santa Barbara, CA. Joseph Miller, Peter John Duda, & Maria De La Vega Delgado Videography Alison and Ernie Tamminga. Sponsored by The Karuna Foundation and The Institute of World Culture.
Director's note. "Beat! Beat! Drums!" ostensibly describes the resistless imperative of war, the utter pale and meaninglessness of ordinary peacetime concerns. Of course, Whitman was describing what he witnessed during the American Civil War. But underneath even seeming factual writing, there is a current of the mystical and metaphorical. Inner truth may also sound like a blaring bugle on the inner ear, calling the truth-seeker "to arms", and reducing all ordinary concerns to nil.
The "Old Cause" that Whitman invokes in the second poem is Brotherhood and Democracy personified, as if a god of old.
