Lincoln and Whitman: Parallel Lives in Civil War Washington

Lincoln and Whitman: Parallel Lives in Civil War Washington, by Daniel Mark Epstein (Ballantine, 379 pp., $24.95)

DANIEL MARK EPSTEIN, poet and biographer, has had the inspired idea of bringing together two quintessential Americans, Abraham Lincoln and Walt Whitman. In the first vignette here, from 1857, Lincoln lies on a couch in his law office, his legs so long they hang over the end. He is reading aloud, and at length, from the new Leaves of Grass. Heretofore, Lincoln's oratory had been shaped by the influence of Euclid's cool logic. Epstein argues persuasively that reading Whitman led Lincoln directly to the rhythms and imagery of his great "House Divided" speech.

Whitman began, in Washington, what amounted to a ministry to the wounded in the fetid hospitals, comforting them as he could. Lincoln became aware of the remarkable presence of Whitman--his huge head, his beard, and his wondering eyes--standing in the crowd watching him as he was driven to and from his summer residence. Whitman wrote: "I see very plainly Abraham Lincoln's dark brown face, with the deep-cut lines, the eyes ... always to me with a deep latent sadness.... We have got so that we always exchange bows."

Lincoln and Whitman were bound by Leaves of Grass, and by their immersion in suffering, appalled by the dead and wounded always present to them. As Whitman wrote, "I am the man, I suffered, I was there." When Lincoln was assassinated, Whitman wrote the most famous elegy, "O Captain! My Captain!" and also the best elegy, "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd." Epstein brings a poet's discernment to his comments on the complex prosody of this masterpiece, with its imagery of the western falling star, the lilac, and the thrush. Epstein's book is a luminous work of insight and evocation.

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