January 20, 2026: Occasional Poems: Whitman on Lincoln

[65 years ago Wednesday, John F. Kennedy was inaugurated as President. One of the most famous parts of that January 1961 event was Robert Frost’s powerful poem, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy that text and other occasional poetry from American history. Leading up to a first for this blog, a piece of my own creative writing!]

On takeaways from the three poems Walt Whitman wrote on the occasion of Lincoln’s assassination.

1)      “Hush’d Be the Camps To-Day (May 4, 1865)”: Whitman’s book of Civil War poetry Drum-Taps (1865) was already in the printing process when Lincoln was assassinated, but the poet managed to get one more poem added to the book in order to reflect that tragic postscript to the war. Supposedly Whitman wasn’t too happy with “Hush’d,” which stands to reason if he completed it more quickly than normal to get it into the book (its first manuscript is in fact dated the day after the assassination). But I think his choice of speaker and perspective is quite brilliant—he writes in the collective voice of Union soldiers, which allows Whitman both to express the communal loss of Lincoln and (in a classic Walt move) make his writing of the poem a response to the soldiers’ request that he “Sing poet in our name/Sing of the love we bore him—because you, dweller in camps, know it truly.”

2)      “O Captain! My Captain!”: Written roughly six months after the assassination and included in his book Sequel to Drum-Taps (1865), “O Captain!’ is definitely Whitman’s most famous response to Lincoln’s death, and perhaps (thanks to a certain fictional English teacher and then a certain climatic tribute to same) his most famous poem period. That’s ironic, as it’s a lot more straightforward and as a result a bit less interesting than most of Whitman’s poems, which is perhaps why he later exclaimed, “Damn My Captain…I’m almost sorry I ever wrote the poem.” But he did add that it “had certain emotional immediate reasons for being,” and I believe that it’s in its two-part stanza structure that the poem fully and impressively embodies those reasons—moving from victory to loss, from wartime triumph to postwar despair, and doing so not just through the two four-line sections in each stanza but also through the page layout of those respective sections.

3)      “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”: Also included in Sequel to Drum-Taps, and indeed giving the book its subtitle, was this much longer and more epic poem inspired by Lincoln’s assassination. And, I would argue, a far more Whitmanesque poem than these other two, in two particular ways that I want to highlight here. First, and more overt, is the poem’s use of pastoral metaphors (including the titular lilacs but also a star and a thrush), rather than direct references to Lincoln and the war and so on, to achieve its powerful emotional resonances. But even more interesting to me is its balance of two very different styles, both of which are at the heart of another epic Whitman poem, “Song of Myself,” as well: first-person romantic elegies; and his famous “catalogs,” lists of people and places and social realities. This is Whitman’s truest occasional poem for Lincoln’s death, and it’s a beautiful one.

Next occasional poem tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Occasional poetry you’d share?