Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism | Death in American Literature (Vol. 89) - Helen Vendler (essay date 1986)

Helen Vendler (essay date 1986)

SOURCE: “Whitman's ‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d’” in Textual Analysis: Some Readers Reading, edited by Mary Anne Caws, The Modern Langauge Association of America, 1986, pp. 132-43.

[In the following excerpt, Vendler examines the various influences on Whitman's style in his “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” and stresses his “de-Christianizing” of the elegy form.]

“When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” is one of six elegies that Whitman wrote for Lincoln. Two of them were rejected from Leaves of Grass;¹ he printed the other four together (1871 Second Issue) under the general title “Memories of President Lincoln.” This group title is in fact misleading; there are no “memories” of Lincoln—of his upbringing, character, or actions in office—in the first three printed elegies at all. Only in the last, “This Dust,” first published...

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