In "O Captain!" the fixation is visible in the image of the "I" staring relentlessly at Lincoln's bloody, pale corpse on the ship of state's deck amid celebrations heralding the ship’s return to port. Both poems marginalize Whitman and concentrate on Lincoln, presaging the poet's obsession with Lincoln in late years. In Whitman’s best-known poems about Lincoln, "O Captain! My Captain!" and "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," the silencing of his former poetic self is noticeable. Reynolds appears to share this view (emphasis mine): That suggests to me that the speaker in that poem is Whitman himself. "He has a face like a Hoosier Michel Angelo," Whitman wrote, "so awful ugly it becomes beautiful, with its strange mouth, its deep cut, criss-cross lines, and its doughnut complexion." "We have got so that we exchange bows, and very cordial ones." Once Lincoln gave Whitman a long friendly stare. "I see the President almost every day," he wrote in the summer of 1863. He didn't meet the President, but spotted him riding through the city for business or pleasure. During the war, when Whitman was a government worker and volunteer hospital nurse in Washington, he saw Lincoln some twenty to thirty times. On February 19, 1861, Whitman was among a throng of curious spectators in New York City who saw the president-elect arriving at the Astor House Hotel during his stopover in the city on his trip from Springfield to Washington, DC. Reynolds in the Journal of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, he had a nodding acquaintance with the President (emphasis mine): Whitman was slightly closer to Lincoln than "just.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |