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Whitman's brother, George Washington Whitman, had been taken prisoner in Virginia on 30 September 1864, and was held for five months in Libby Prison, a Confederate prisoner-of-war camp near Richmond, Virginia. He volunteered in army hospitals as a 'hospital missionary.' His wartime experiences informed his poetry, which matured into reflections on death and youth, the brutality of war, and patriotism, and offered stark images and vignettes of the war.

OLD TOWN HORSE SONG STRUCTURE STROPHES SERIES

Īt the start of the American Civil War, Whitman moved from New York to Washington, D.C., where he obtained work in a series of government offices, first with the Army Paymaster's Office and later with the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The small volume, first released in 1855, was considered controversial by some, with critics attacking Whitman's verse as 'obscene.' However, it attracted praise from American Transcendentalist essayist, lecturer, and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson, which contributed to fostering significant interest in Whitman's work.

OLD TOWN HORSE SONG STRUCTURE STROPHES FREE

Whitman intended to write a distinctly American epic and developed a free verse style inspired by the cadences of the King James Bible. In the late 1850s and early 1860s, Whitman established his reputation as a poet with the release of Leaves of Grass. Although Whitman did not consider the poem to be among his best, it has been compared in both effect and quality to several acclaimed works of English literature, including elegies such as John Milton 's Lycidas (1637) and Percy Bysshe Shelley's Adonais (1821).

The poem is one of several that Whitman wrote on Lincoln's death.

These poems, collected under the titles Drum-Taps and Sequel to Drum-Taps, range in emotional context from 'excitement to woe, from distant observation to engagement, from belief to resignation' and 'more concerned with history than the self, more aware of the precariousness of America's present and future than of its expansive promise.' First published in autumn 1865, 'When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd'-along with 42 other poems from Drum-Taps and Sequel to Drum-Taps-was absorbed into Leaves of Grass beginning with the fourth edition, published in 1867. Whitman included the poem as part of a quickly written sequel to a collection of poems addressing the war that was being printed at the time of Lincoln's death. Written ten years after publishing the first edition of Leaves of Grass (1855), 'When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd' reflects a maturing of Whitman's poetic vision from a drama of identity and romantic exuberance that has been tempered by his emotional experience of the American Civil War. The poem also addresses the pity of war through imagery vaguely referencing the American Civil War (1861–1865), which effectively ended only days before the assassination. Instead, he uses a series of rural and natural imagery including the symbols of the lilacs, a drooping star in the western sky ( Venus), and the hermit thrush, and he employs the traditional progression of the pastoral elegy in moving from grief toward an acceptance and knowledge of death. Despite being an expression to the fallen president, Whitman neither mentions Lincoln by name nor discusses the circumstances of his death in the poem. The poem, written in free verse in 206 lines, uses many of the literary techniques associated with the pastoral elegy. It was written in the summer of 1865 during a period of profound national mourning in the aftermath of the president's assassination on 14 April of that year. ' When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd' is a long poem written by American poet Walt Whitman (1819–1892) as an elegy to President Abraham Lincoln. The poem's first page in the 1865 edition of Sequel to Drum-Taps

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