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Whitman's “Lilacs” And The Tradition Of Pastoral Elegy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Richard P. Adams
Richard P. Adams*
Affiliation:
Tulane University, New Orleans, La.
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Extract

Whitman liked to picture himself as an innocent, primitive genius whose “barbaric yawp” was prompted by nature, not culture, and whose originality was ignorant of precedents and uncontaminated by book learning. But modern scholars and critics have shown that he and his art are not so simple as they pretend to be. They are products of a well-advanced artistic and literary development. My purpose is to examine one of his best poems, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd,” in relation to one of the oldest, most highly respected literary traditions in our civilization—that of pastoral elegy. Everyone knows that “Lilacs” is an elegy, and several writers have compared it in a general way to others, such as “Lycidas,” “Adonais,” and Emerson's “Threnody.” George Meyer of Newcomb College has pointed out the relation of “Lilacs” to pastoral elegy in class lectures, and doubtless others have noticed the same relation in various ways. But no one to my knowledge has made a systematic study of it.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 72 , Issue 3 , June 1957 , pp. 479 - 487
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1957

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References

Note 1 in page 479 H. S. Canby, Walt Whitman (Boston, 1943), p. 240; James Thomson, Walt Whitman (London, 1910), p. 36; and G. W. Allen, The Solitary Singer (New York, 1955), p. 341.

Note 2 in page 479 See G. Norlin, “The Conventions of Pastoral Elegy,” AJP, xxxii (1911), 296–312, and C. G. Osgood's note in The Works of Edmund Spenser, ed. E. Greenlaw et al. (The Minor Poems, Baltimore, 1943), i, 399.

Note 3 in page 480 See J. H. Hanford, “The Pastoral Elegy and Milton's Lycidas,” PMLA, xxv (1910), 409–446.

Note 4 in page 480 See, e.g., The Complete Writings of Walt Whitman, ed. H. L. Traubel et al. (New York, 1902), vi, 289, and vii, 23.

Note 5 in page 480 H. L. Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden, ii (New York, 1908), 345.

Note 6 in page 480 Ibid., iv (Philadelphia, 1953), 452.

Note 7 in page 480 See Allen, p. 156.

Note 8 in page 480 Allen, p. 127; Complete Writings, x, 82 (also p. 67 for another clipping on Shelley).

Note 9 in page 480 See notes in Shelley: Selected Poems ..., ed. Ellsworth Barnard (New York, 1944), pp. 386–416.

Note 10 in page 481 “Adonais: Progressive Revelation as a Poetic Mode,” ELU, xxi (Dec. 1954), 282, 292.

Note 11 in page 482 Theocritus, Bion and Moschus, tr. A. Lang (London, 1932), p. 201.

Note 12 in page 482 Complete Writings, v, 246 (Whitman's lecture on the death of Lincoln, first given in New York, 14 April 1879).

Note 13 in page 484 Passim; most clearly summarized on p. 295.