In his early notebooks, Whitman repeatedly uses the term dilation when writing about the work of his Poet-Nurse-Soldier.

Imagined as expansion, dilation ties directly to the notion of Manifest Destiny, and more particularly, to Whitman’s many editorials written in support of the Mexican War in the pages of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle.

Dilation
I think the soul will
never stop, or attain to any
its growth beyond which
it shall not go. no further.—
When have sometimes when
I I walked at night by
the sea shore and looked
up to at the stars countless
stars, I and have asked of my
soul whether it would
be filled and satisfied
when it was should become the god
enfolding an all these
and open to the life and
delight and knowledge of
every thing in them or of
them; and the answer
was plain[ ] to my ear me

them at the on breaking water
on the sands at my
feet; and it the answer was, No,
when I reach there, I
shall want more to
go further still.--

As with the study of any author, it has long been useful in Whitman Studies to divide Whitman’s career into phases, utilizing the divisions of what seem to be the salient landmark events of his life and writings. For example, the publication of the first edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855 often has been said to mark Whitman’s shift from "hack" journalist to poet. The shorthand version of this has drawn upon Whitman’s occupational transitions: for example, from journalist to poet to Civil War nurse. Looked at one way, Whitman’s move to Washington, D.C. looking for his brother George represents such a biographical break.

But Brothers in Arms may raise another possibility, one marked by continuity quite as much as discontinuity. Beginning with Whitman’s conceptualization of the poet in the pages of his earliest extant notebooks, these "separate" categories do not appear to be so separate after all: Whitman imagines a Poet who brings together the Nurse and the Soldier. These continuities may carry important consequences for our reading of Whitman’s writings, the phases of his life, and the concept of gender in/and the Civil War.

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