ABSTRACT
Whitman never lost a transcendental sense of the unity of all things; all of life and experience, reality itself, were process, a ceaseless, continuing, all-embracing flow. Whitman is reluctantly relinquishing his hold on his poem, releasing its central images of lilac, star, and bird from the visionary process that has woven them together in mournful and rapturous memorialization of the death of President Lincoln. Whitman had always been a devotee of Lincoln, whom he regarded as an archetype of the representative democratic man. Whitman is above all the poet of that powerful Atomic and transcendental vision of America and the American, present in American culture from the earliest settlements, but given massive reinforcement by the triumphant conclusion of the American Revolution. It is the democratic idealism of this enduring tradition that Whitman centrally embodies and celebrates. Because this is so, Whitman is hardly to be seen as the poet of post-Civil War America.
