Walt Whitman and Abraham Lincoln

• 1. Wartime Encounters And Observations

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  On the 19th of February 1861, Abraham Lincoln traveled through New York City as president-elect. Walt Whitman stood among the crowd and watched this man who would lead the nation through civil war. Whitman noted Lincoln's striking appearance and unpretentious dignity in letters to his mother. He described the president's face as a Hoosier Michel Angelo, so awful ugly it becomes beautiful. The poet estimated he saw Lincoln about twenty to thirty times between 1861 and 1865. Sometimes they were in the same room at White House receptions following Lincoln's first inauguration. Whitman visited John Hay, Lincoln's private secretary, at the White House during one such visit. In August 1863, Whitman wrote in The New York Times that he saw the president almost every day. They shared similar views on slavery and the Union, though they never met personally. Whitman later said that Lincoln gets almost nearer me than anybody else.

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• 2. The Assassination And Immediate Response

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  Abraham Lincoln died on the morning of the 15th of April 1865 after being shot at Ford's Theatre on April 14. Walt Whitman was residing in Brooklyn while on break from his job at the Department of the Interior when he heard the news. His family did not eat breakfast that day and not a word was spoken all day. On the 19th of April 1865, the day of Lincoln's funeral in Washington, Whitman dated his poem Hush'd Be the Camps To-Day. He halted further distribution of Drum-Taps and stopped publication on May 1 primarily to develop his Lincoln poems. Within months he wrote two more elegies: O Captain! My Captain! and When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd. Both appeared in his collection Sequel to Drum-Taps later that year. English professor Amanda Gailey described Whitman's decision to publish My Captain in The Saturday Press as a teaser for Sequel. Copies were not ready for distribution until December despite Sequel having been published in early October.

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• 3. Poetic Evolution Of The Lincoln Cluster

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  Whitman did not compose This Dust Was Once the Man until 1871, four years after the assassination. The first three poems formed a cluster called President Lincoln's Burial Hymn in Passage to India. Ten years later, in a later edition of Leaves of Grass, the grouping was named Memories of President Lincoln. The poems were not revised substantially following their publication. Critics have noted stylistic differences among poems in the cluster; Daniel Mark Epstein felt it may seem hard to believe that the same writer wrote both Lilacs and O Captain! My Captain!. Hush'd, This Dust, and My Captain are instances of Whitman subordinating himself and writing as someone else, whereas Lilacs is Whitman speaking. Helen Vendler argued that the poems go from Lincoln's being a dead commander in Hush'd, to fallen cold and dead in My Captain to dust in This Dust. All the elegies lack historical specificity: Lincoln's name is not mentioned in any of the poems. Vendler argues this makes the cluster's title misleading because only This Dust actually comments on Lincoln.

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• 4. Lectures As Public Legacy Building

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  In 1875, Whitman published Memoranda During the War which included a telling of Lincoln's assassination from his perspective. The New York Sun published that section in 1876 to a positive reception. Richard Watson Gilder and several of Whitman's other friends soon suggested he give a series of Lincoln Lectures aimed at raising both funds and Whitman's profile. Whitman adapted his New York Sun article for the lectures and gave them from 1879 to 1890. They centered on the assassination but also covered the years leading up to and during the American Civil War. Whitman occasionally gave poetry readings such as O Captain! My Captain during these events. In 1980, Whitman biographer Justin Kaplan wrote that Whitman's 1887 lecture in New York City and its after-party marked the closest he came to social eminence on a large scale. In 1885, Whitman contributed an essay about his experiences with Lincoln to a volume being compiled by Allen Thorndike Rice. Novelist Bram Stoker discussed the deceased president with Whitman in November 1886.

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• 5. Critical Reception And Literary History

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  The cluster of poems improved Whitman's reputation and included one considered by critics to be his best Lilacs and one of his most popular My Captain. Henry James accused Whitman of exploiting the tragedy of Lincoln's death to serve himself. By contrast, Sequel to Drum-Taps convinced William Dean Howells that Whitman had cleaned his old channels of their filth and poured a stream of blameless purity through. Following a critical reappraisal, critics wrote about the poems' conventionality and lack of originality. Lilacs superseded them as one of the most prominent poems of the Civil War era. In 1962, Whitman biographer James E. Miller described several poems in the cluster as competently executed expressions of public sentiment on a high public occasion but lacking the sentimentality and powerful symbolism of Lilacs. The scholar of American literature Charles M. Oliver wrote in 2006 that Whitman's works on Lincoln represent him at his most eloquent. In 1920, Léon Bazalgette, a French literary critic, wrote Lilacs and My Captain had established Whitman as the poet who sings the American nation.

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