`An Earthy Poetry'

That Walt Whitman loved and idealized Abraham Lincoln, and that his worst poem (“O Captain! My Captain!”) and one of his best (“When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”) elegized the martyred president, is old news to any educated American. More than that, it’s part of our common national mythology, in the company of Thomas Edison’s tungsten and Louis Armstrong’s calloused embouchure.

What I’ve already learned from Daniel Mark Epstein, just 50 pages into his Lincoln and Whitman: Parallel Lives in Civil War Washington, is that the admiration and inspiration were mutual. Lincoln read the second edition of Leaves of Grass (the first came out on July 4, 1855) in 1857. The place was the law office in Springfield , Ill., Lincoln shared with his partner William “Billy” Herndon, who had purchased the controversial volume from a bookseller in Chicago. Herndon, who later wrote Lincoln’s biography, was a book collector and enthusiastic admirer of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Whitman’s other inspiration. Epstein quotes a speech Lincoln made to Wisconsin farmers in 1859:

“Every blade of grass is a study. And not grass alone; but soil seeds, and seasons . . . the thousand things of which these are specimens – each a world of study within itself.”

Sound familiar? Leaves of Grass? Specimen Days? On May 31, 1859, his 39th birthday, Whitman wrote an appeal for “a revolution in American oratory” and “a great leading representative man, with perfect power, perfect confidence in his power . . . who will make free the American soul.” According to Epstein, Whitman helped spark the very “revolution in American oratory” he was calling for. Epstein speculates that the change in Lincoln’s rhetoric so perceptible in 1857-1858, especially in the great “House Divided” speech he gave June 16, 1858, owes something to his reading of Leaves of Grass. Epstein, a first-rate poet, is a humble enough historian to admit that Whitman’s influence on Lincoln may have been “unconscious,” but that seems unlikely given Whitman’s notoriety and the sui generis nature of Leaves of Grass, even today, in both matter and form. As Epstein puts it:

“Leaves of Grass introduced several ideas to Western civilization, ideas so boldly expressed that readers in England, France, and America were shocked by them. These include the equality of all things and beings, the sacredness and supremacy of personality (the “Self”), and the belief that the poet was `commensurate’ with his people, incarnating the sexual and working life of America as well as its geography.”

Epstein’s book is a pleasure and probably obligatory reading for anyone interested in American culture. It’s well written and Epstein carefully documents his points, often juxtaposing the words of Lincoln and Whitman. He lends credence to the argument made most famously by Jacques Barzun and Edmund Wilson, that Lincoln was an exceptional writer who, had he followed another path, might have ranked with Whitman, Melville and Twain. In her American Humor, Constance Rourke bolsters Epstein’s case:

“Poetry belonged to most of Lincoln’s stories – an earthy poetry; he used the fable, the allegory, the tale grounded in metaphor. The artist was often at work there: but with all the praise bestowed upon them, upon the Gettysburg speech and in a less knowledgeable fashion upon his other writings, Lincoln has rarely been described as a literary figure. Irony works in this relinquishment. Yet perhaps the uncertain view has fitness, for his alliance with the simple and primitive phases of American life remained strong.”