greykit.poetry — Walt Whitman

• 1865 [walt-whitman] O Captain! My Captain!
  Leaves of Grass

  Whitman's elegy for Lincoln as fallen ship's captain — the voyage won and the port in sight, but the Captain lies cold and dead on the deck while the crowds exult on shore.

  #elegy#Lincoln#Civil War#loss#1860s
• 1865 [walt-whitman] When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd
  Leaves of Grass

  Whitman's great elegy for Lincoln — the lilac's perennial bloom, the drooping western star, and the hermit thrush singing death's carol in the swamps; the poem that transformed a president's death into a national rite of mourning.

  #elegy#Lincoln#death#America#1860s
• 1860 [walt-whitman] I Hear America Singing
  Leaves of Grass

  Whitman hears the varied carols of America — carpenter, mason, boatman, shoemaker — each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else.

  #lyric#America#democracy#labor#1860s
• 1855 [walt-whitman] Song of Myself
  Leaves of Grass

  Whitman's great democratic epic — celebrating himself, and through himself, every atom of every person — sprawling across 52 sections from the grass at his feet to the spotted hawk's yawp over the roofs of the world.

  #epic#self#nature#democracy#cosmos#1850s