ABSTRACT
Walt Whitman unacknowledged convention, as everywhere, makes it impossible for him to conceive either the being or the value of the individual without conceiving him as an example of mankind in general. Were he to read Whitman’s poem, Milton would doubtless observe that instead of bestowing flowers upon Lincoln, as he should, the poet bestows them first on all the dead equally and then on death itself. In Whitman’s poem the poet finds solace for his grief, not by placing himself in a grieving society but by withdrawing from the world and, in effect, curing his grief by feeling the more powerful emotion of loneliness. In contrast to Milton’s tragic conception of nature, Whitman’s grasp upon nature issues, not in a vision of universal order, but either in the affective pathos of somewhat theatrical symbols like the lilac and the cedars and pines or in the brooding, lyric but abstract meditations upon death.
