Whitman's Lincoln

Walt Whitman was at work on a sequence of poems about national identity when Lincoln's body passed through Maryland and Indiana on its way to Springfield, Illinois. As Martin Griffin writes in this New York Times article, Whitman never met Lincoln, but was transfixed by his role and legacy in American politics. From NYT:

The train that brought Abraham Lincoln’s body back to Springfield, Ill., took almost two weeks to complete its journey, making a long, northeasterly loop through Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio and Indiana. The last stretch, from Chicago to Springfield, was completed on the morning of May 3, 1865.

The journey was widely covered in the press as millions of Americans turned out to pay their last respects. Generations of historians have described, and tried to interpret the meaning of, this unique funeral procession. But no author has probed the event more deeply than Walt Whitman.

Whitman, poet, journalist and part-time civil servant in the federal government, had been preparing a volume of poetry, “Drum-Taps,” for publication when news of the president’s assassination came through. Over the summer, he wrote several new poems, including three pieces in memory of Lincoln that appeared in an expanded collection, “Sequel to Drum-Taps,” in October.

The poems included the long meditation “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” which has become part of the canon of American elegies; of the shorter pieces, only “O Captain! My Captain” achieved any lasting popularity among the American public.

“Lilacs” is a poem of just over 200 lines, divided into 16 sections. It is a free-verse composition in which echoes of classical elegiac poetry and cadences of biblical prophecy jostle against images of the American landscape and the violence of the Civil War. Although Lincoln is not named in the poem, “Lilacs” is about political martyrdom. At the same time, the poem reflects much of Whitman’s earlier thinking about national identity as he had broken from traditional literary forms, experimenting in his continuing verse sequence “Leaves of Grass” from 1855 onward with a new type of poetry to capture the energies and contradictions of American life. [...]

Continue at NYT.