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Whitman's “Lilacs” and the Grammars of Time

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Mutlu Konuk Blasing
Mutlu Konuk Blasing*
Affiliation:
Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island
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Abstract

Whitman's experimental poetic, a part of larger personal and national experiments, was severely tried by the assassination of President Lincoln. “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd,” the poem occasioned by Lincoln's death, is not a traditional elegy but a crisis poem: in it, Whitman tests the efficacy of various poetic and linguistic forms and conventions in confronting the terrorism of history and the acute consciousness of time that the assassination triggered in him. While he acknowledges in “Lilacs” the attractions of elegiac conventions, narrative orders, symbolism, and transcendent lyricism, he learns in the course of the poem to do without them and the consolations they offer. “Lilacs” not only reaffirms Whitman's commitment to experimentalism but moves beyond his earlier major poems in its full consciousness and complete acceptance of the dangers and the necessity of forgoing the protection of conventions and traditional forms and orders.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 97 , Issue 1 , January 1982 , pp. 31 - 39
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1982

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References

Note 1 See, e.g., Gay Wilson Allen, The New Walt Whitman Handbook (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1975). Allen calls “Lilacs” Whitman's “masterpiece,” because the symbols in this poem are “handled with a skill found nowhere else in Leaves of Grass” (p. 117). James E. Miller, Jr., in A Critical Guide to Leaves of Grass (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1957), also refers to “Lilacs” as Whitman's “masterpiece,” citing his “skillful use” of symbols and “masterful technique” (pp. 225–26). David Daiches, in Leaves of Grass One Hundred Years After, ed. Milton Hindus (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univ. Press, 1955), regards “Lilacs” as “the most delicate of Whitman's major poems, using his characteristic technique in a more restrained and a more complex way than is usual with him” (p. 118). Finally, Charles Feidelson, Jr., in his Symbolism and American Literature (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1953), thinks “Lilacs” is Whitman's “best poem” “only because it does not fully live up to the theory [of continuous process] which it both states and illustrates.” Because Whitman has a stabilizing subject matter here, Feidelson argues, his form is no longer “arbitrary”—as it usually is in his other work (p. 25).

Note 2 Malcolm Cowley, “Whitman: The Poet,” New Republic, 20 Oct. 1947, pp. 27–30. Earlier, Basil DeSelincourt, in Walt Whitman: A Critical Study (New York: Mitchell Kennedy, 1914), judged “Lilacs” in similar terms: “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd, majestic as it is, does not maintain the proud aloofness of rhythm which never forsakes [Whitman] at his best. Its passages of conventional melody, verging upon sing-song, have no doubt made the dirge more popular than it otherwise could have been … ” (p. 176).

Note 3 Richard Chase, for instance, finds the poem “refined” with a certain “artificiality”: “And if the mind whose imprint we read on the Lincoln elegy is harmonious and moving, it is also in danger of an excessive refinement. It is in danger of wishing to substitute antiseptics for the healing processes of nature in which it cannot quite believe any more. How else is one to account for the sterile, the really Egyptian, atmosphere of odors, perfumes, herbage, pine, and cedar, to say nothing of the outright lyric worship of death itself?” (Wait Whitman Reconsidered [New York: Sloane, 1955], p. 145).

Note 4 The final lines are generally read not as a new statement but as a restatement only. For example, Calvin S. Brown, in Music and Literature: A Comparison of the Arts (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1948), sees the final lines as a “restatement” of the symbols “in much their original form, but with a great enrichment,” and concludes, “This is clearly the circular structure of the typical musical composition rather than the linear development of the literary work” (p. 193). Robert D. Faner, in Walt Whitman and Opera (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1951), regards the final section as “the Coda, in which with consummate skill all the implications of the previous sections are combined into a finale, reaching its compact and eloquent conclusion in the last nine lines …” (p. 158). Fredrick Schyberg, in Walt Whitman, trans. Evie Allison Allen (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1951), also sees the ending as a “diminuendo in the form of a final reiteration of the motifs of the poem” (p. 203), as do Gay Wilson Allen and Charles T. Davis in their Selections with Critical Aids: Walt Whitman's Poems (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1955), p. 233. Feidelson is an exception to this consensus; according to him, the true subject of the poem is the “poetic process” itself, and the ending of the poem returns to that activity (p. 25).

Note 5 “Death of Abraham Lincoln,” in Prose Works 1892, ed. Floyd Stovall (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1964), ii, 503–04, 504, 506, 507.

Note 8 “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd,” Leaves of Grass: Comprehensive Reader's Edition, ed. Harold W. Blodgett and Sculley Bradley (New York: Norton, 1968), pp. 328–37. Subsequent references are to this edition.

Note 7 Quoted in Arnold Hauser, Mannerism: The Crisis of the Renaissance and the Origin of Modern Art, trans. Eric Mosbacher (New York: Knopf, 1965), p. 292.

Note 8 Indeed, readings of “Lilacs” as a traditional elegy stop here. Richard P. Adams, for example, writes, “The final worth of Whitman's elegy lies more than that of most elegies … in the [bird's] song itself … ” (“Whitman's ‘Lilacs’ and the Tradition of Pastoral Elegy,” PMLA, 72 [1957], 487). Chase, who reads “Lilacs” as a “swan song” worshiping death, also seems to stop with the lyric (p. 145).

Note 9 Quoted in Gay Wilson Allen, The Solitary Singer (New York: Grove, 1955), p. 143. Whitman uses a similar description in “Song of Myself for the song of a ”train'd soprano“:

I am cut by bitter and angry hail, I lose my breath, Steep'd amid honey'd morphine, my windpipe throttled in fakes of death,

At length let up again to feel the puzzle of puzzles, And that we call Being.

Note 10 The change of type, which stages an admitted fiction within the larger fiction of a poem, is a device Whitman uses elsewhere. For example, he italicizes the “aria” in “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” to set it off from the rest of the poem, because it is a conventional, stylized representation or “translation” of the natural music that awakens the boy to his “tongue's use,” to the complex of eros, death, and language—“the myriad thence-arous'd words,” which are indistinguishable from what “The messenger there arous'd, the fire, the sweet hell within, / The unknown want, the destiny of me.”

Note 11 Quoted in The Poet and the President: Whitman's Lincoln Poems, ed. William Coyle (New York: Odyssey, 1962), pp. 18–19.

Note 12 Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1941), p. 618.

Note 13 O'Hara, “Personism: A Manifesto,” in The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara, ed. Donald M. Allen (New York: Knopf, 1971), p. 498.

Note 14 Stevens, “Martial Cadenza,” in The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Knopf, 1954), p. 238.

Note 15 Martin Heidegger, “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry,” trans. Douglas Scott, in Heidegger, Existence and Being (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1970), p. 279.