So Long! Walt Whitman's Poetry of Death

(Elle) #1

tile to Lincoln’s policies, but the third volume, published after Lincoln’s death cele-
brates him as a hero-martyr. On Gurowski see LeRoy Fisher, Lincoln’s Gad®y: Adam
Gurowski (Norman: U Oklahoma P, 1964).



  1. R. Gerald McMurtry, “The Lincoln Funeral Car,” in The Poet and the Presi-
    dent: Whitman’s Lincoln Poems, ed. William Coyle (New York: Odyssey Press, 1962),
    124–131.

  2. See Laderman, Sacred Remains, 157–163, and the photographs following 116.
    Photographs and commercial reproductions of Lincoln’s iconic corpse, which to the
    untrained eye seemed almost alive and beyond decay, were widely printed in the
    media.

  3. Zweig, Walt Whitman, 129.

  4. On the literature of consolation, see Douglas, “Heaven Our Home,” 49–68.

  5. On the concept that war is an instrument of progress as well as a national
    purgative, see Barbara Ehrenreich, Blood Rites, 222 and passim.

  6. Emerson’s statement quoted in Laderman, Sacred Remains, 128.

  7. Hutchinson, Ecstatic Whitman, 153.

  8. Derrida, Work of Mourning, 142–143; Staten, Eros in Mourning, xii, 11.

  9. Sacks, English Elegy, 317.

  10. Edwin Haviland Miller, ed., Walt Whitman’s Poetry: A Psychological Journey
    (Boston: Houghton Mif®in, 1968), 189.

  11. Miklos Udvarty, The Audubon Society Field Guide to the Birds of North America:
    Western Region (New York: Knopf, 1977), 743.

  12. W. David Shaw, Elegy and Paradox: Testing the Conventions (Baltimore: Johns
    Hopkins UP, 1994), 165.

  13. Lynch, Undertaking, 13, 21.

  14. “Elegy for Jane, My Student Thrown from a Horse,” 1953, in The Collected
    Poems of Theodore Roethke (New York: Doubleday, 1966), 102.

  15. Loving, Walt Whitman, 285–286, notes Whitman’s favorable observations of
    Lincoln and his fascination with his physiognomy, recorded in some of his newspaper
    pieces and other writings. But he also notes that Whitman (who creates a mythic
    bond with the President in “Lilacs,” section 8) later in life exaggerated his intimacy
    with Lincoln, going so far as to repeat the tale in his Lincoln lectures that he was
    seated close to Lincoln in Ford’s Theater when the president was fatally shot. See
    also PW1892, 59–61.

  16. See Adams, “Whitman’s ‘Lilacs’ and the Tradition of Pastoral Poetry,” PMLA
    72 (1957), 481.

  17. Jeffrey Steele, “Poetic Grief Work in Whitman’s ‘Lilacs,’” WWQR 2 (winter
    1984), 15.

  18. Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in
    America (New York: Oxford UP, 1967), 222.

  19. Rosemary L. Gates, “Egyptian Myth and Whitman’s ‘Lilacs,’” WWQR 5
    (summer 1987), 24; Edwards, Images and Shadows of Divine Things, 58. Gates remarks
    that “The sun does not represent Osiris per se, but rather the immortality of Osiris,
    who made immortality possible and who was symbolically cradled in the arms of
    the sun.”


268 / Notes to Pages 192–199
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