By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d’ is one of the most famous poems by the American poet, Walt Whitman (1819-92). Across 206 lines of innovative free verse, Whitman offers an elegy for Abraham Lincoln, who had been assassinated shortly before Whitman wrote the […]
Tag: Walt Whitman
A Short Analysis of Walt Whitman’s ‘Whoever You Are Holding Me Now in Hand’
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘Whoever You Are Holding Me Now in Hand’ is a Walt Whitman poem addressed to his reader, and might be viewed as a disclaimer for all of Whitman’s poetry – much as another of his famous poems, ‘Song of Myself’, can be read as […]
A Short Analysis of Walt Whitman’s ‘O Me! O Life!’
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) One of the shortest of Walt Whitman’s great poems, ‘O Me! O Life!’ was featured in the 1989 film Dead Poets Society: Robin Williams’s character recites it to his class. ‘O Me! O Life!’ contains many of the features of Walt Whitman’s greatest poetry: […]
‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d’: A Poem by Walt Whitman
One of several poems Walt Whitman wrote about Abraham Lincoln, and probably the best, ‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d’ was written in the summer of 1865, in the aftermath of the assassination of Lincoln in April of that year. An example of the pastoral elegy, ‘When Lilacs Last […]
‘O Captain! My Captain!’: A Poem by Walt Whitman
Even those who aren’t familiar with Walt Whitman’s poems may recognise ‘O Captain! My Captain!’, thanks to its use in the 1989 Robin Williams film Dead Poets Society. Like another of Whitman’s poems, ‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d’, ‘O Captain! My Captain!’ was written in the wake of […]