Tue 27 Oct 2009
The love that Walt Whitman felt towards Abraham Lincoln can be divided into two broad kinds of love. The first is a personal infatuation bordering on obsession that could alternately be viewed as romantic, but strictly abstract, similar to the feelings of the devotees to Elijah Wood that roamed the halls of my school after The Fellowship of the Ring came out (I know, really? Ian McKellan is totally the hot one of the bunch). This is the Whitman that we lovingly mock, the Whitman who stood on street corners, trying to make eye contact with Lincoln. The other sort of Whitman loved Lincoln because he recognized in him his own (Whitman’s) poetry and philosophy, converted into a working political method. A particularly telling moment is Whitman’s essay, quoted in our Whitman and Lincoln reading, is Whitman’s call for a new, Western-raised president, that Lincoln fulfills unnervingly well. Whitman saw the parallels between his work and that of Lincoln and embraced the political figure of Lincoln. The assassination forced Whitman to reevaluate his feelings on Lincoln, of which the ideologically driven love proved stronger than the mere personal appreciation. Whitman’s lecture on Lincoln and his elegy, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”, show his fusion of the two loves and his emphasis on the national persona of Lincoln.
I gather from reading the text of Whitman’s Lincoln lecture and from the dramatic reenactment by Epstein that Whitman felt that Lincoln’s death was a national tragedy, a grief that belonged to all Americans. His appropriation of Peter Doyle’s memories of the assassination is part of Whitman’s belief in the universality of the moment: in a way, everyone experienced what occured that night. While we may not ethically agree with the way he expressed this, it does prove his point. As he appropriates someone else’s experiences of the event, he relives it for the audience, so that they can feel that they were there as well.
On the other hand, “When Lilacs last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” takes the death of Lincoln from a single death and equates it with the other deaths of the war, and death in general. In this way, he identifies his personal grief at the death of Lincoln as the universally experienced grief at the death of loved ones.
October 27th, 2009 at 3:37 pm
Your notion of the fusion of the two kinds of love really pinpoints what I also perceive as Whitman’s love for Lincoln. There was undeniably some sort of an attraction, but there was also something more. Lincoln’s death was most certainly a national tragedy, as was Kennedy’s assassination, as was Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, as was… (the list goes on). The death of Lincoln, and all these others, hold a significance beyond the office they held and/or the authority they wielded. The most “tragic” deaths are the deaths of those who are genuinely good and have made some sort of positive change. As the symbol of said positive change, when that person dies the many people who have observed, have benefited, have desired that change, feel a pang of personal loss.
I mean, I’m just saying that no one felt that sad when Hitler died (except maybe a handful of Nazi freaks); and when Saddam Hussein died people were celebrating in the streets. Catch my drift?
October 27th, 2009 at 4:11 pm
Sarah- I think that you did a really great job of categorizing Whitman’s feelings towards Lincoln. There is definitely an aspect of it that is obsessive and unrealistic, much like celebrity-worship. But there is something more relevant under the surface. Lincoln did embody much of what Whitman seemed to deem most important in a man and was probably glad to see his idea of manhood represented in the presidency. It may have been unlikely that some log-cabin boy would go on to become president, but Whitman had probably been wanting that all along. I can’t help but think, however, that at least some of Lincoln’s apparent perfection was provided by Whitman himself.
October 27th, 2009 at 5:04 pm
I think both Sarah and Courtney speak to a potential gap in Whitman’s reverence for Lincoln– if Whitman idolized Lincoln from afar, even if eloquently and with fine attention to certain points, what is the cap on how much Whitman could really appreciate? I think the distance and unrequited factor in their relationship is part of what makes the infatuation sustainable as beautiful and uniquely poignant– it’s as if Whitman wasn’t held to the responsibilities of a lover writing a poem about his partner because he couldn’t know as much as an intimate lover, so he gets to focus on the beauties that wouldn’t be as easy to ignore or refute with a closer look at Lincoln.
I’m very on-board with Sarah’s and Allison’s comments about the effect of mourning one person with a mass of people, mourning someone like Lincoln who affected so many. I’d contrast that kind of mourning with that of a non-celebrity but someone who meant a lot to a smaller number of people, like just family and friends. Losing someone not famous is more forceably internalized because you’ll run into more people who don’t know of the person so they don’t grieve, and there’s a more normalizing environment–even though a more internalized/personal grief has its own hurdles. But if you are constantly surrounded by people who were affected by the deceased, it in a way seems like deeper despair because no one is unaffected by the death. The flip-side is that there is a strong communal bond, and Whitman was magnifying both sides of that experience by conveying his grief as strongly as he did.