Walt Whitman's Elegies for Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln was the 16th President of the United States and led the country through the American Civil War until his assassination in 1865. Walt Whitman was a poet who established his reputation with his poetry collection Leaves of Grass. Whitman moved to Washington, D.C. at the start of the Civil War where he volunteered as a nurse in army hospitals. Whitman admired Lincoln and saw the Union and America itself incarnated in him. Whitman and Lincoln never met, but Whitman estimated he saw Lincoln about 20 to 30 times between 1861 and 1865. Whitman wrote several poems about Lincoln's assassination, including "Hush'd Be the Camps To-Day," "O Captain! My Captain!", "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," and "This Dust Was Once the Man." Whitman also wrote a final poem with Lincoln as its subject, titled "Abraham Lincoln, Born Feb. 12, 1809." Whitman published Memoranda During the War in 1875, a collection of diary entries that includes a telling of Lincoln's assassination from the perspective of someone who was present. Whitman gave lectures on Abraham Lincoln.

• Walt Whitman gave a series of lectures on Lincoln from 1879 to 1890, which were generally popular and well received.
• Whitman contributed an essay about his experiences with Lincoln to a volume being compiled by Allen Thorndike Rice.
• Whitman's Lincoln poetry was not immediately popular, but his lectures helped to raise the perception of the poems around the nation.
• "My Captain!" became Whitman's most popular poem; it was his only poem to be anthologized before his death.
• Whitman portrayed Lincoln by using metaphors such as the captain of the ship of state and made his assassination into a monumental event.
• Critics have noted Whitman's departure from his earlier poetry in his Lincoln poems.
• The cluster of poems in Sequel to Drum-Taps improved Whitman's reputation, and included one considered by critics to be his best ("Lilacs") and one of his most popular ("My Captain!").
• Critics have noted stylistic differences among poems in the cluster.
• Whitman's tributes to Lincoln showed how he could make what he wrote about seem "mythical".
• Critics have noted the significance of Whitman's response to Lincoln's death in memorializing all those who had died in the Civil War.
• "Lilacs" is a poem by Whitman.
• The poem is part of a trend in Whitman's poetry to be more elegiac.
• The cluster in the poem is successful in reflecting the grief of one individual that reflects the nation's pain.
• The critic Joann P. Krieg argues that the cluster succeeds in this way.
• Whitman's poems on Lincoln have proven to last the best among poetry written in the mid- to late-19th century.
• Vendler is a critic who felt this way.
• Whitman's poetry is elegiac and reflects grief.
• "Lilacs" is an example of this.
• The cluster in the poem is effective in reflecting the nation's pain.
• Whitman's poetry is considered among the best written on Lincoln.