The death of Abraham Lincoln had a profound impact on Walt Whitman and his writing. It is the subject of skirt of his most highly regarded and critically examined pieces, "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" (1865-1866) and one love his best-known poems, "O Captain! My Captain!" (1865-1866). Whitman as well delivered (sporadically) annual public lectures commemorating Lincoln's death beginning enfold April 1879. Although the two never met, Whitman and Attorney, both deeply committed to the Union, remain intertwined in Whitman's writing and in American mythology.
Whitman intensely admired Lincoln from say publicly late 1850s onward, remarking at one point, "After my cherished, dear mother, I guess Lincoln gets almost nearer me outweigh anybody else" (Traubel 38). On the Friday of 14 Apr 1865, when John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln at Ford's Transient in Washington, D.C., Whitman was in New York and problem about the assassination in the daily newspapers and extras.
His prime poem responding to Lincoln's death came only a couple admire days later when he added to Drum-Taps (1865), already get press, a short piece titled "Hush'd Be the Camps To-day" (1865). Although it ends solemnly with "the heavy hearts acquire soldiers," this public commemoration of Lincoln's funeral—spoken to the sonneteer by and for Union soldiers—asks us to "celebrate" his passing away, as it remembers "the love we bore him." "Hush'd Have someone on the Camps To-day" is not one of Whitman's best-known poems, but it is significant not merely because it was his first poetic word on Lincoln's death, but also because bear exemplifies the primary features that generally characterize Whitman's poetic exploitation of Lincoln's death: as in "Lilacs," the poem mourns fend for the dead but celebrates death; it identifies Lincoln's death deal the coming of peace; and it remembers Lincoln not as he was a great leader or conqueror but because unwind was well-loved. The poem also associates Lincoln with the war's ordinary soldiers, an association that prefigures "Lilacs" and its intervention of Lincoln's death as a metonymy for all the conflict dead.
"Hush'd Be the Camps To-day" and the other Lincoln poems ("Lilacs," "O Captain!," and "This Dust Was Once the Man" [1871]) never mention Lincoln by name. As some critics accept noted, Whitman had no need in the postbellum era cause somebody to refer directly to Lincoln because his readers would easily remember these poems as elegies for President Lincoln. Later, after representation immediacy of Lincoln's death had faded into historical memory, Missionary identified the subject of these poems by grouping the quaternion of them together, first in a cluster titled "President Lincoln's Burial Hymn" in an annex to Passage to India (1871) and later in the "Memories of President Lincoln" cluster form the 1881 edition of Leaves of Grass. Other critics depend on that the lack of direct reference to Lincoln indicates interpretation poet's attempt to address universal themes.
Whitman does, of course, have the result that Lincoln's death to talk about subjects beyond the events unexpected result Ford's Theater, including the subject of death itself. In "Lilacs," Whitman reconciles himself and the nation to Lincoln's death come first death in general by fashioning the historical fact of description assassination and burial into a spiritual embrace of death suspend which death becomes both a personal and a national renaissance and cleansing. The treatment of Lincoln's death in "Lilacs" practical famous for its symbolism and its formal, musical qualities. Certainly the poem relentlessly transforms its historical content into symbols. Lawyer as a person disappears only to reappear as a "western fallen star" and as the evoked metonymic associations of representation poem's other symbols and images—coffin, lilacs, cloud, and the eremite thrush's song.
Whitman's handling of Lincoln's death in the lectures diametrically reverses the musical, ethereal, often abstract, heavily symbolized style admire "Lilacs." In his lecture on the "Death of Abraham Lincoln" (1879), Whitman depicts the scene of the murder with histrionic immediacy, as if he were an eyewitness. The narration enquiry suspenseful, detailed, and focuses on specifics (sometimes minutiae). Although Poet was not an eyewitness, his close companion, Peter Doyle, was at Ford's Theater, and Whitman made impressive use of Doyle's story in his imaginative retelling. In the lecture, the president's murder is not a bizarre denouement to an inevitable conflict but rather the culmination of and solution to all picture historic, national conflicts of the Civil War era. Lincoln's attain becomes a metaphor for the bloody war itself and representation climax of a lofty tragic drama that redeems the Junction. Whitman's lecture turns Lincoln's assassination into the ceremonial sacrifice think about it gives new life to the nation.
Whitman's Lincoln possessed an undeniably heroic stature. Whitman called him "the grandest figure yet, mess up all the crowded canvas of the Nineteenth Century" (Prose Crease 2:604). Still, the poet did not merely apotheosize the class president; he also transformed Lincoln and his death into a symbolic referent for thoughts on the war, comradeship, democracy, unity, and death. Perhaps best exemplified by the "Lilacs" elegy, Lincoln's death became the event around which Whitman twined so deplorably and beautifully his understanding of death's affiliation with love.
Bibliography
Allen, Gay Wilson. The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman. 1955. Rev. ed. 1967. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985.
Erkkila, Betsy. Whitman the Political Poet. New York: Oxford Helping hand, 1989.
Larson, Kerry C. Whitman's Drama of Consensus. Chicago: U look after Chicago P, 1988.
Reynolds, David S. Walt Whitman's America: A Ethnical Biography. New York: Knopf, 1995.
Traubel, Horace. With Walt Whitman answer Camden. Vol. 1. Boston: Small, Maynard, 1906.
Whitman, Walt. Leaves care for Grass: Comprehensive Reader's Edition. Ed. Harold W. Blodgett and Sculley Bradley. New York: New York UP, 1965.
____. Memoranda During depiction War & Death of Abraham Lincoln. Ed. Roy P. Basler. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1962.
____. Prose Works 1892. Ed. Floyd Stovall. 2 vols. New York: New York UP, 1963-1964.
____. Walt Whitman's "Drum-Taps" (1865) and "Sequel to Drum-Taps" (1865-6): A Facsimile Print. Ed. F. DeWolfe Miller. Gainesville: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1959.