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Title details for Lincoln and Whitman by Daniel Mark Epstein - Available

Lincoln and Whitman

Parallel Lives in Civil War Washington

by Daniel Mark Epstein
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It was more than coincidence—indeed, it was all but fate—that the lives and thoughts of Abraham Lincoln and Walt Whitman should converge during the terrible years of the Civil War. Kindred spirits despite their profound differences in position and circumstance, Lincoln and Whitman shared a vision of the democratic character that sprang from the deepest part of their being. They had read or listened to each other’s words at crucial turning points in their lives. Both were utterly transformed by the tragedy of the war. In this radiant book, poet and biographer Daniel Mark Epstein tracks the parallel lives of these two titans from the day that Lincoln first read Leaves of Grass to the elegy Whitman composed after Lincoln’s assassination in 1865.
Drawing on the rich trove of personal and newspaper accounts, diary records, and lore that has accumulated around both the president and the poet, Epstein structures his double portrait in a series of dramatic, atmospheric scenes. Whitman, though initially skeptical of the Illinois Republican, became enthralled when Lincoln stopped in New York on the way to his first inauguration. During the war years, after Whitman moved to Washington to minister to wounded soldiers, the poet’s devotion to the president developed into a passion bordering on obsession. “Lincoln is particularly my man, and by the same token, I am Lincoln’s man.”
As Epstein shows, the influence and reverence flowed both ways. Lincoln had been deeply immersed in Whitman’s verse when he wrote his incendiary “House Divided” speech, and Whitman remained an influence during the darkest years of the war. But their mutual impact went beyond the intellectual. Epstein brings to life the many friends and contacts his heroes shared—Lincoln’s debonair private secretary John Hay, the fiery abolitionist senator Charles Sumner, the mysterious and possibly dangerous Polish Count Gurowski—as he unfolds the story of their legendary encounters in New York City and especially Washington during the war years.
Blending history, biography, and a deeply informed appreciation of Whitman’s verse and Lincoln’s rhetoric, Epstein has written a masterful and original portrait of two great men and the era they shaped through the vision they held in common.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    December 18, 2007

  • Formats

    • Kindle Book

    • OverDrive Read

      • ISBN: 9780307431400

    • EPUB ebook

      • ISBN: 9780307431400
      • File size: 7170 KB

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      December 22, 2003
      Poet and biographer Epstein (What Lips My Lips Have Kissed,
      about Edna St. Vincent Millay) covers the same ground canvassed most recently, and more ably, by Roy Morris Jr. in his much-praised The Better Angel: Walt Whitman in the Civil War
      . Where Epstein falters is in his basic paradigm: a narrative that insists on interleaving the "parallel"—but never intersecting—lives of Abraham Lincoln and Walt Whitman. The two never met. They shared no common ground in politics—Whitman, a copperhead Democrat, a bigot and no abolitionist, thought the Northern cause in the Civil War absurd. That Lincoln read and was impressed by Leaves of Grass
      is questioned by most scholars, yet Epstein takes it on face value. Later, moved by the tragic drama of the president's murder, Whitman wrote two elegiac poems ("When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" and "Captain, My Captain"). His subsequent "Specimen Days and Collect" included diary memoranda referring to glimpses of Lincoln around Washington, and in old age the impoverished Whitman sometimes raised money for himself by giving talks containing his reminiscences of Lincoln and wartime Washington. But the "parallels" between these two very different lives don't hold together the thread of Epstein's narrative. As well, readers well versed in the story of Whitman and his milieu during the early 1860s will be annoyed by several small errors. (Example: The New York poet and farmer Myron Benton was not a friend of Whitman's, though he was a fan of the poet's and had a mutual friend in John Burroughs.)

Formats

  • Kindle Book
  • OverDrive Read
  • EPUB ebook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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