“I see the President almost every day, as I happen to live where he passes to or from his lodgings out of town. He never sleeps at the White House during the hot season, but has quarters at a healthy location some three miles north of the city, the Soldier’s Home, a United States military establishment. I saw him this morning about 8:30, coming in to business, riding on Vermont Avenue, near L Street…. I see very plainly Abraham Lincoln’s dark brown face, with the deep-cut lines, the eyes, always to me with a deep latent sadness in the expression. We have got so that we exchange bows, and very cordial ones.”–Walt Whitman, “Specimen Days,” August 12, 1863
TEXT: Whitman, “Song of Myself” (1855, 1867) and “O Captain! My Captain!” (1865)
- The poems that Whitman numbered 51 and 52 (in the 1867 edition of Leaves of Grass) closed the volume of his poetry that he first self-published in 1855 and that he kept revising until the end of his life
- Whitman published his more traditional rhyming poem, “O Captain! My Captain” in a New York newspaper in November 1865 and then in his collection of Civil War poems, Drum Taps (1865).
CONTEXT: End of Civil War
- Lincoln promised the nation post-war reconciliation in his March 1865 inaugural address (“with malice toward none”) but he was assassinated on April 14, 1865. The subsequent period of Reconstruction under Presidents Andrew Johnson and Ulysses Grant proved to be turbulent and bitter without forging full equality across racial or gender lines.
SUBTEXT: Poetic Voice
- From Whitman’s original preface to Leaves of Grass (1855):
The Americans of all nations at any time upon the earth have probably the fullest poetical nature. The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem. In the history of the earth hitherto the largest and most stirring appear tame and orderly to their ampler largeness and stir. Here at last is something in the doings of man that corresponds with the broadcast doings of the day and night. Here is not merely a nation but a teeming nation of nations.
METHODS CENTER —History vs. Historiography
- Understand that history is more than a chronology of facts