ABSTRACT
In one of his earliest written responses to Abraham Lincoln’s assassination in 1865, the poet Walt Whitman composed a list on two sheets of scrap paper. While Whitman’s thoughts about Lincoln’s death would eventually achieve a highly formal state in poems like his acclaimed elegy, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” they initially take a far more inchoate form (see Illustration I.1):
Illustration I.1 Whitman, manuscript, 1865 Source: Charles E. Feinberg Collection. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
