Walt Whitman's Memories of President Lincoln

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To A Fallen Hero Walt Whitman’s Memories of President Lincoln is a series of pieces written in 1865 after Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, even though President Lincoln’s name is never mentioned after the title. In the poem When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d, one of the poems in Memories of President Lincoln, Whitman describes three scenes. The first is following Abraham Lincoln’s coffin to its burial. The second is with the narrator and his lilac, which is to be placed upon Abraham Lincoln’s coffin, as he reminisces and mourns the president’s death. The third and final scene is that of a bird and a star and gives the idea that nature is sympathetic to this tragedy of man. Like most elegies, it develops from the personal (the death of Lincoln and the poet’s grief) to the impersonal (the death of “all of you” and death itself), from an intense feeling of grief to the thought of reconciliation. President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated on April 14, 1865 by well known actor John Wilkes Booth (Abraham Lincoln – 16th President of the United States). It came just five days after the surrender of Robert E. Lee, commanding General of the Army of Northern Virginia, to General Ulysses S. Grant. The plan was part of a larger conspiracy intended to rally the remaining Confederate troops to continue fighting. Booth had two accomplices, Lewis Powell and George Atzerodt, who had plotted to kill Secretary of State William H. Seward and Vice President Andrew Johnson respectively. Booth’s plan was to simultaneously strike down the top 3 in command of the Union government in order to throw it into disarray. Booth succeeded in his part of the plan by shooting President Lincoln while he was watching Our American Cousin at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C. Lincoln died the next morning. Powell only managed to wound Secretary of State Seward and Vice President Johnson was
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