is obliquely related to the tradition of what has been called nineteenth-
century “mortuary music.” Beginning with the marcia funebra of Beetho-
ven’s Third Symphony, Romantic composers like Liszt, Wagner, Chopin,
and Bruckner developed a virtuoso music of personal lamentation. The
poem also has nuances of the Romantic operas that Whitman loved.^67
Some ¤fteen years after the war Whitman wrote a poem mocking his
detractors’ claims that his “chants” had “forgotten art, / To fuse within
themselves its rules precise and delicatesse,” but boasting that his poems—
like the Rocky Mountains themselves—were not “formless wild arrays”
but responses to nature’s creative impulse.^68 Far from unfamiliar with
English poetry, he probably knew some of the great elegies that had pre-
ceded his. “I don’t ignore the old stock elements of poetry,” he remarked,
“but instead of making them main things, I keep them away in the back-
ground, or like the roots of ®owers and trees, out of sight.”^69 For “Lilacs”
has some de¤nite af¤nities with the tradition of the English elegy and its
formalized lament for the death of a great or esteemed personage and
such classical conventions as the grieving poet’s surrender to the inexo-
rable sway of death. Moreover, the English elegists had demonstrated the
®exibility of form and language that is possible within the elegiac mode.
Of the major devices customarily associated with the classical elegy, Whit-
man omitted two important ones: employing classic mythological trap-
pings (although, as we shall see, he invented a powerful mythology of his
own) and bestowing a name on the poem’s deceased subject. Among the
elegiac conventions that he included are the announcement of the sub-
ject’s death; a eulogy for the dead man; the pathetic fallacy in which na-
ture sympathizes with the poet’s grief; the placing of ®owers on the bier;
a funeral procession with its many mourners; a confession that the poet’s
grief has rendered him emotionally impotent; and an antiphonal interplay
between the poet’s grief and that of his nation.^70 In contrast to traditional
practice, the martyred president who is the true subject of the poem is
never named, never described, and never directly addressed. Although the
poem contains a striking episode describing the mystical bonding be-
tween the poet’s spirit and that of the doomed president, it claims no
personal relationship between the poet and the president. Whitman’s
wartime notebook entries and his newspaper dispatches do indeed praise
Lincoln for his calm, for his wisdom in the face of adversity, and for his
mastery of a trying situation. And in lines as terse as Lincoln’s Gettysburg
Address, Whitman later wrote:
“Come Sweet Death!” / 191