This Dust Was Once the Man

"This Dust Was Once the Man" is an elegy poem written by Walt Whitman in 1871. The poem is dedicated to Abraham Lincoln, the 16th President of the United States, who Whitman greatly admired. The poem was written six years after Lincoln's assassination. Whitman had written three previous poems about Lincoln, all in 1865: "O Captain! My Captain!", "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd", and "Hush'd Be the Camps To-Day".

Page 42 of the 1871 Leaves of Grass, part of the "Memories of President Lincoln" cluster, containing "This Dust Was Once the Man" and "Hush'd Be the Camps To-Day".

Background

Walt Whitman and Abraham Lincoln
Main article: Walt Whitman and Abraham Lincoln

Although they never met, Whitman saw Abraham Lincoln several times between 1861 and 1865, sometimes in close quarters. The first time was when Lincoln stopped in New York City in 1861 on his way to Washington. Whitman noticed the President-elect's "striking appearance" and "unpretentious dignity", and trusted Lincoln's "supernatural tact" and "idiomatic Western genius".[1][2] He admired the President, writing in October 1863, "I love the President personally."[3] Whitman considered himself and Lincoln to be "afloat in the same stream" and "rooted in the same ground".[1][2] Whitman and Lincoln shared similar views on slavery and the Union, and similarities have been noted in their literary styles and inspirations. Whitman later declared that "Lincoln gets almost nearer me than anybody else."[1][2]

There is an account of Lincoln reading Whitman's Leaves of Grass poetry collection in his office, and another of the President saying "Well, he looks like a man!" upon seeing Whitman in Washington, D.C., but these accounts are probably fictitious. Lincoln's death on April 15, 1865, greatly moved Whitman, who wrote several poems in tribute to the fallen President. "O Captain! My Captain!", "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd", "Hush'd Be the Camps To-Day", and "This Dust Was Once the Man" were all written as sequels to Drum-Taps. The poems do not specifically mention Lincoln, although they turn the assassination of the President into a sort of martyrdom.[1][2]

Text

This dust was once the man,
Gentle, plain, just and resolute, under whose cautious hand,
Against the foulest crime in history known in any land or age,
Was saved the Union of these States.[4]

Publication history

Whitman wrote the poem in 1871 and published it in the "President Lincoln's Burial Hymn" cluster of Passage to India. It was republished in the "Memories of President Lincoln" cluster, first in the 1871–1872 edition of Leaves of Grass. It is the only poem in this cluster that was not first in Drum-Taps or Sequel to Drum-Taps. The poem was not revised after its first publication.[5][6][7]

Analysis

In contrast to Whitman's earlier poems on Lincoln, which describe him as a leader, as a friend, or as "a wise and sweet soul", here he is described as simply dust. Helen Vendler considers it Lincoln's epitaph. Whitman "grasps the dust to himself". She then argues that the epitaph is unbalanced. Half of the poem's meaning is contained in "this dust", and the following thirty words constitute the other half. She notes that dust is light, while Lincoln himself holds "complex historical weight". In the second line, Vendler notes the difference between 'gentle', which she considers a "personal" word, and the final, "official", descriptor of 'resolute'. She considers it surprising that the poem "gives no active verb to its subject", instead describing Lincoln as primus inter pares, the 'cautious' guiding hand of the nation.[8]

Whitman writes in the third line: 'the foulest crime known in any land or age.' Ed Folsom argues that the 'foulest crime' could refer instead to secession and notes that many 'Whitmanians' view the phrase as referring to secession.[9] In contrast, Vendler writes that this is a euphemism to refer to slavery.[8] In Lincoln and The Poets, William Wilson Betts writes that it is instead the assassination of Lincoln that is called the "foulest crime in history".[10] In 2019, Folsom wrote that "it is almost always assumed" the 'foulest crime' is "not slavery but either secession itself or the assassination of Lincoln". The phrase 'foulest crime' likely came from Herman Melville's Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War. Melville is generally considered to have been referring to slavery.[11] Roy Morris considers the crime to be "a heartbreaking civil war that filled the hospitals of the capital with the ruined bodies of beautiful young soldiers."[12] Edward W. Huffstetler writes that the 'foulest crime' is "of course, secession" and argues that "nowhere do Whitman's feelings for the South take on a more bitter tone" than in "This Dust".[13]

In Secular Lyric, John Michael draws comparisons between the poem and the Book of Common Prayer, saying that it emphasizes the "materiality of the body" and conveys grief through "understatement" by "refusing conventional rhetorical gestures of ornamentation or consolation". Lincoln's preservation of the union serves to make his assassination "more poignant". Michael particularly highlights the simplicity of dust, noting that Whitman does not rely on metaphors or other poetical devices to convey Lincoln's death– as opposed to "O Captain! My Captain!" which utilizes the Ship of State metaphor and makes Lincoln a quasi-religious figure. Instead, Whitman forces the reader to face the "brute fact of mortality", as Lincoln has been reduced to dust.[14]

Deak Nabers notes that Whitman does not mention emancipation in the epitaph and is careful not to attribute the saving of the Union to Lincoln himself, instead saying that it was preserved "under [Lincoln's] hand", while still giving Lincoln credit for his work. Similarly, he draws comparisons between the poem and Herman Melville's "The House-Top" and William Wells Brown's Clotel.[15] The final line inverts the standard "United States was saved" to "Was saved the Union of these States", which Vendler concludes gives the Union a "climactic syntactic position of national value". Vendler concludes her analysis by saying that the poem has "Roman succinctness and taciturnity" and makes "dust [...] equal in weight to the salvation of the Union".[8]

Reception

In 1943, Henry Seidel Canby wrote that Whitman's poems on Lincoln have become known as "the poems of Lincoln" and noted the "fine lines" of "This Dust".[16] William E. Barton wrote in 1965 that neither "This Dust" nor "Hush'd be the Camps" "would have attracted much attention at the time or have added anything later to the poet's reputation".[17] Martha C. Nussbaum considers the epitaph "one of Whitman's simplest and most eloquent statements".[18]

See also

References
  1. Griffin, Martin (May 4, 2015). "How Whitman Remembered Lincoln". Opinionator. The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved October 12, 2020.
  2. Eiselein, Gregory (1998). LeMaster, J. R.; Kummings, Donald D. (eds.). 'Lincoln, Abraham (1809–1865)' (Criticism). New York City: Garland Publishing. Retrieved October 12, 2020 – via The Walt Whitman Archive.
  3. Loving 1999, p. 288.
  4. "This Dust Was Once the Man". Archived from the original on 2012-06-27. Retrieved 2012-01-25.
  5. Folsom 2019, p. 27.
  6. Eiselein 1998, p. 395.
  7. Coyle 1962, p. 22.
  8. Vendler, Helen (Winter 2000). "Poetry and the Mediation of Value: Whitman on Lincoln". Michigan Quarterly Review. XXXIX (1). hdl:2027/spo.act2080.0039.101. ISSN 1558-7266.
  9. Folsom, Ed (2014-05-15). ""That towering bulge of pure white": Whitman, Melville, the Capitol Dome, and Black America". Leviathan. 16 (1): 117. doi:10.1353/lvn.2014.0016. ISSN 1750-1849. S2CID 143633494.
  10. Betts, William Wilson (1965). Lincoln and the Poets. University of Pittsburgh Press. p. 154.
  11. Folsom 2019, pp. 26–27.
  12. Folsom 2019, p. 28.
  13. Huffstetler 1998, p. 672.
  14. Michael 2018, pp. 101–102.
  15. Nabers 2006, pp. 173–174.
  16. Coyle 1962, pp. 201–202.
  17. Barton 1965, p. 172.
  18. Nussbaum 2011, pp. 97–98.

Sources
  • Barton, William E. (1965). Abraham Lincoln and Walt Whitman. Kennikat Press. OCLC 428681.
  • Coyle, William (1962). The Poet and the President: Whitman's Lincoln Poems. Odyssey Press. OCLC 2591078.
  • Eiselein, Gregory (1998). "Lincoln's Death". In LeMaster, J. R.; Kummings, Donald D. (eds.). Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia. Routledge. pp. 395–396. ISBN 978-0-8153-1876-7.
  • Folsom, Ed (2019). Sten, Christopher; Hoffman, Tyler (eds.). "This Mighty Convulsion": Whitman and Melville Write The Civil War. University of Iowa Press. pp. 23–32. ISBN 978-1-60938-664-1. OCLC 1089839323.
  • Huffstetler, Edward W. (1998). "The American South". In LeMaster, J. R.; Kummings, Donald D. (eds.). Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia. Routledge. pp. 671–672. ISBN 978-0-8153-1876-7.
  • Loving, Jerome (1999). Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself. University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-21427-7. OCLC 39313629.
  • Michael, John (2018). Secular Lyric: The Modernization of The Poem in Poe, Whitman, and Dickinson. Fordham University Press. ISBN 978-0-8232-7974-6. OCLC 1029634170.
  • Nabers, Deak (2006). Victory of Law: The Fourteenth Amendment, The Civil War, and American literature, 1852-1867. Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 978-0-8018-8931-8. OCLC 213306078.
  • Nussbaum, Martha C. (2011). "Democratic Desire: Walt Whitman". In Seery, John Evan (ed.). A Political Companion to Walt Whitman. University Press of Kentucky. pp. 96–130. ISBN 978-0-8131-2655-5. OCLC 707092896.
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