26 pages • 52 minutes read
Walt WhitmanWhen Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1865A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Further Reading & Resources
Related Poems
“The Waste Land“ by T.S. Eliot (1922)
In one of his best-known and most influential works, Eliot begins with lilacs in April in Part I, introduces the song of the hermit thrush in Part V, bookending the poem with the images of death and artistic translation from Whitman’s poem. Part V of “The Waste Land” also echoes “Lilacs” when asking “who is the third who walks always beside you,” calling up Canto 14: “Then with the knowledge of death as walking on one side of me […]” (Canto 14, Lines 13-14).
“Kaddish“ by Allen Ginsberg (1957)
Allen Ginsberg’s extended poem of mourning demonstrates Whitman’s influence in its extended descriptions of place, its long, expansive lines, and its chant-like anaphora. Ginsberg acknowledges Whitman’s influence on his poetry and even made Whitman a character in his poem “A Supermarket in California.”
“Lincoln is Dead“ by George Moses Horton (1865)
George Moses Horton, the first American to publish a book while enslaved, wrote several poems on Lincoln’s assassination. In this poem, contemporary to Whitman’s tribute, Horton compares Lincoln to another celestial body in the west—the setting sun. Horton left North Carolina with Union troops in 1865, liberated by the Emancipation Proclamation. For over 30 years, Horton had to purchase his own time in order to write and publish his work.
“Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats“ by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1821)
Shelley’s traditional interpretation of a pastoral elegy memorializes his friend and fellow poet, John Keats. Shelley’s poem employs extended metaphor and allegory to laud Keats; the lament creates a mood to represent the tragedy of Keats’s lost talent and potential. In the Greek myth, Adonais lives on after his premature death due to the goddess Aphrodite’s exceptional love for him. In the poem, Shelley preserves Keats’s memory through demonstration of his quality of affection, and by attesting to both Keats’s virtues and poetic excellence. Shelley’s lament portrays death as adversarial and unfeeling, in contrast to Whitman’s vision of death as an infinite peace and a source of intense emotional outpouring.
Further Literary Resources
“Lilacs for Lincoln (and Kennedy and King)“ by Sudip Bose
This article discusses Roger Sessions’s cantata based on Whitman’s poem. Sessions adapts the work as a memorial for John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. in the wake of their assassinations, finding in Whitman’s poem the mood and character necessary for another national epic work of bereavement. The article examines the lyric nature of the poem, looking at particularly musical sections.
“Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)“ by William A. Pannapacker
In the biographical entry for Abraham Lincoln within the Walt Whitman Archive, William Pannapacker explains that Whitman knew more of Lincoln than Lincoln knew of Whitman, but that they shared similar political views and aspects of background and demeanor. The short article details Whitman’s admiration for Lincoln before his death, grounding that assertion in quotations from Whitman’s personal writings.
Walt Whitman in Washington, D.C.: The Civil War and America’s Great Poet by Garrett Peck (2015)
Peck’s work details Whitman’s search for his brother George and his subsequent years caring for soldiers during the American Civil War. The book tracks Whitman’s ascendancy to this period, especially his poems about the war and about Lincoln.
Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography by David S. Reynolds (1995)
This book politically and socially contextualizes Whitman’s life and work within its historical moment. Reynolds’s approach mirrors Whitman’s encompassing vision of America, placing the poet among his contemporary influences in ways that illuminate his work.
"Poetry and the Mediation of Value: Whitman on Lincoln" by Helen Vendler
Noted literary critic Helen Vendler examines the poem’s composition within its immediate historical context, as well as within the context of Whitman’s three other Lincoln poems and within the wider scope of his work. Vendler rejects the idea of Judeo-Christian framing in the poem, seeing “Lilacs” as Whitman’s personal, lyric, poetic response to a public trauma. In his other Lincoln poems, Whitman assumes various personas in a democratic poetic role as the voice of the people. But Vendler attributes the timeless and original quality of “Lilacs” to its dual sensibilities of interior and public worlds.
Listen to Poem
Performed with the New York Philharmonic, Paul Hindemith’s 1946 oratorio adapts Whitman’s poem for chorus in tribute to Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Related Titles
By Walt Whitman
