1. Based on what you read in History in the Making and what you may know about Lincoln from elsewhere, what was there about Abraham Lincoln’s personality that made him an effective leader?
2. In “O Captain” and “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” how does Whitman characterize Lincoln, either literally or figuratively? Are the traits you mentioned in response to question #1 suggested by either poem?
3. In “Lilacs,” how does Whitman depict the nation in 1865? What lines in the poem stand out to you, and why?
4. Some historians have noted that Walt Whitman was fascinated with Lincoln, even though the two men apparently never met. In fact, literature professor Martin Griffin has written of “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” “the elegy lays claim to the invisible brotherhood of Abraham Lincoln and Walt Whitman.” It’s clear Lincoln’s life and death deeply affected Whitman, as for many years, Whitman delivered a lecture on Lincoln’s death on the anniversary of the assassination.
Griffin explains that
Lincoln was an unlikely president for a nation in crisis, as Whitman was an unlikely poet of national spiritual exploration. It was not only their similar class origins — Lincoln in Kentucky and Indiana, Whitman on Long Island — in a workingman’s America, far from any social or educational privilege, that they had in common, but also the willingness, in each case, to believe in the task that life had delivered them
Whitman also saw a link with Lincoln in their common language. In [his poetry], Whitman used American idiom to invoke an American democratic landscape, and in particular an egalitarian tolerance. . .He saw the same sort of skill with the same sort of language in Lincoln’s speeches.
There was a poetry to many of Lincoln’s public addresses that tried to find that place in the American psyche, that place where people would grasp the importance of his policies, and of persevering until victory, and subsequently of repairing the nation. The president was, in many ways, walking the road the same road as Whitman: a journey to find the central meaning of the United States, a journey that would shun the path of shallow boosterism, that would embrace ugly truths and hard decisions.
In what ways do the language and imagery in “Lilacs” support Griffin’s assertions about Whitman and Lincoln?
5. As students of history, what can we learn from poetry that we might not learn from other sources? (You might recall as well Puritan Anne Bradstreet’s poems on the deaths of her grandchildren.)
6. What did you learn from “Lilacs” and “O Captain” that you didn’t already know from the textbook or other sources?