... was once a unified whole, a Union. “Lilacs” is a poem about loss and death and the sense of the world coming to a stasis. Lincoln was ... being mourned. Most readers assumed Whitman was writing about Lincoln, but Whitman’s great elegy is in part remarkable because we ...
sbaehr - 07/13/2021 - 14:01
... During the last decade of Whitman’s life, his famous poem about Abraham Lincoln’s assassination—“O Captain! My Captain!”—became ... only have been written by someone who had thought deeply about the impact that his own letters, written on behalf of soldiers too sick ...
sbaehr - 07/13/2021 - 14:01
... we, the survivors, can live. It is what we tell ourselves about soldiers in any war: they sacrificed their lives for us; they died for ... and grim, with well-grey'd hair, and flesh all sunken about the eyes? Who are you, my dear comrade? Then to the second I ...
sbaehr - 07/13/2021 - 14:01
... body takes us to the very edges of identity: it is “about as much as I can stand.” E.F. ... and am happy, To touch my person to some one else's is about as much as I can stand. ...
kraken - 07/13/2021 - 13:59
... unknown (as we saw in last week’s letter to his mother about his despair over a nameless soldier), and to begin the difficult work of ... America that was noisily spending its way into forgetfulness about the massive sacrifice of the war whose ghosts stand silently and ...
sbaehr - 07/13/2021 - 14:01
... retreat—Arthur took him in his arms, and he died in about an hour and a half—Arthur buried him himself—he dug his grave.” ... again” will respond to kiss or touch. Everything about the inverted syntax (which persists throughout the poem in phrases like ...
sbaehr - 07/13/2021 - 14:01
... to it, and needing it. (Everything is quiet now, here about Falmouth and the Rappahannock, but there was noise enough a week or so ... results of the late battles are exhibited everywhere about here in thousands of cases, (hundreds die every day,) in the Camp, ...
sbaehr - 07/13/2021 - 14:01
... flies; he gets a kind of bird’s-eye view of a young couple about to make love in the bushes; and he observes and describes a suicide in a ... Question Think about Whitman’s catalog of city sounds in this section. How would the catalog ...
kraken - 07/13/2021 - 13:59
... glimpse into the way that all of nature is continually about the procreant “urge and urge and urge” of desire itself (as Whitman ... for the wound of consciousness. He knew a thing or two about the intimate connection between departures and arrivals, endings and ...
kraken - 07/13/2021 - 13:59
... the unvoiced is what “Song of Myself,” finally, is all about—finding the miraculous in dung-beetles, finding sacred renewal in sex ... physical work (including the writing of this poem) brings about change in this world. Victorian morality and orthodox religion are ...
kraken - 07/13/2021 - 13:59
