From Publishers Weekly
Poet and biographer Epstein (What Lips My Lips Have Kissed, about Edna St. Vincent Millay) covers the same ground canvassed most recently, and more ably, by Roy Morris Jr. in his much-praised The Better Angel: Walt Whitman in the Civil War. Where Epstein falters is in his basic paradigm: a narrative that insists on interleaving the "parallel"-but never intersecting-lives of Abraham Lincoln and Walt Whitman. The two never met. They shared no common ground in politics-Whitman, a copperhead Democrat, a bigot and no abolitionist, thought the Northern cause in the Civil War absurd. That Lincoln read and was impressed by Leaves of Grass is questioned by most scholars, yet Epstein takes it on face value. Later, moved by the tragic drama of the president's murder, Whitman wrote two elegiac poems ("When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" and "Captain, My Captain"). His subsequent "Specimen Days and Collect" included diary memoranda referring to glimpses of Lincoln around Washington, and in old age the impoverished Whitman sometimes raised money for himself by giving talks containing his reminiscences of Lincoln and wartime Washington. But the "parallels" between these two very different lives don't hold together the thread of Epstein's narrative. As well, readers well versed in the story of Whitman and his milieu during the early 1860s will be annoyed by several small errors. (Example: The New York poet and farmer Myron Benton was not a friend of Whitman's, though he was a fan of the poet's and had a mutual friend in John Burroughs.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Walt Whitman, 19th-century America's greatest poet, and Abraham Lincoln, its greatest political leader, shared a number of experiences and beliefs. A powerful ambition to succeed inspired both to rise to prominence from humble origins. Neither had much formal education, but both achieved a remarkable command of the English language. They disliked slavery, believed fervently in democracy and lived in Washington during the Civil War. These affinities, Daniel Mark Epstein believes, justify describing the two men as having led "parallel lives." It is easier to say what Lincoln and Whitman is not than what it is. The book's treatment of its two protagonists' lives is too episodic to qualify as dual biography. It is not the story of a relationship, because none existed. Nor does Epstein succeed in establishing intellectual or artistic influence, one way or the other. He suggests that a change in Lincoln's literary style occurred in the year 1857, when he read the "long, racy, unrhymed" free verse of Whitman's Leaves of Grass. The opening of Lincoln's little-known 1858 "Lecture on Discoveries and Inventions," Epstein points out, sounds a lot like Whitman ("All creation is a mine, and every man, a miner"). But this hardly establishes that Whitman, as Epstein claims, exerted a "distinct literary influence" on Lincoln. In Euclidian geometry, parallel lines never intersect. Nor, it seems, did Lincoln's and Whitman's parallel lives, except in the latter's fertile imagination. After the poet moved from New York to Washington in 1862, Lincoln began to appear in Whitman's dreams. He rented rooms near the White House and persuaded himself that he and the president were kindred spirits: "We are afloat on the same stream -- we are rooted in the same ground." Whitman became, in Epstein's words, "a President-watcher." He stationed himself on a street corner during the summer of 1863 to catch a glimpse of Lincoln on his daily carriage ride. "I see the president almost every day," Whitman wrote. But apart from waving once or twice, Lincoln seemed to be unaware of Whitman's presence. Like the Whitman-Lincoln "relationship" itself, Epstein's account lacks balance. A poet and a biographer of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Epstein offers a revealing character study of Whitman and a penetrating analysis of his wartime poetry. He brings the private Whitman to life with all his powerful and unstable emotions -- his desire to serve his country, his ambition to be recognized as the American poet, his frustration with a burdensome family and lack of commercial success. He expertly paints the worlds in which Whitman moved, from Pfaff's saloon, where the poet enjoyed the bohemian camaraderie of the New York literati, to the military hospitals in Washington where he tended wounded soldiers during the Civil War. He offers a sensitive account of Whitman's homoerotic attachments, especially his love affair with a young Washington streetcar conductor, Peter Doyle, which began in 1865 and lasted for nearly a decade. Epstein is at his best in describing the impact on Whitman of Lincoln's assassination. Doyle was at Ford's Theatre that night and heard the fatal shot. Whitman was in New York. When news of Lincoln's death reached the city, he took to the streets, jotting observations in his notebook that seem uncannily familiar to anyone who recalls the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11 -- business suspended, flags at half staff, and on people's faces a "strange mixture of horror, fury, tenderness, & a stirring wonder brewing." The assassination inspired Whitman to write his greatest poem, "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd." A metaphysical rumination on death and a panorama of the grieving nation as Lincoln's coffin traveled to its Illinois resting place, this, wrote Algernon Swinburne, was "the most sweet and sonorous nocturne ever chanted in the church of the world." Today's generation produced nothing remotely comparable after our own recent national tragedy. Lincoln, unfortunately, remains a far more shadowy presence in the book than Whitman. Epstein allows Whitman's language to entrance the reader, but not Lincoln's, and he fails to turn his interpretive talents to Lincoln's writings. The Gettysburg Address goes unmentioned, and of the magnificent second inaugural, perhaps Lincoln's greatest speech, Epstein says only that it was "notable that day more for its restraint than its eloquence." He calls Whitman and Lincoln "visionaries" but tells us next to nothing about Lincoln's views on the issues of the day -- the Union, emancipation, the future status of the freed people. When he does venture into wartime politics, Epstein's judgments are not always reliable. Was Lincoln really "practically a pariah" in the eyes of most Americans in the spring of 1863? Was his pocket veto of the Wade-Davis Bill of 1864 the "most contentious" exercise of presidential power in American history? Epstein's dual portrait ends in 1887 with Whitman delivering a lecture on Lincoln to a distinguished New York audience that included Mark Twain and Andrew Carnegie. The poet presented a moving and revealing personal reminiscence. Yet the speech remained too episodic and too apolitical to offer a truly profound account of Lincoln's career, such as Frederick Douglass had offered 11 years earlier in his great oration at the unveiling of a Lincoln statue in Washington. In a sense, Lincoln and Whitman has the same strengths as Whitman's address, and suffers from the same weaknesses. Reviewed by Eric FonerCopyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.


From Booklist
So-called parallel lives, or dual biographies, frequently stretch the bounds of credulity in finding common threads to connect their subjects. Fortunately, Epstein, a poet and a biographer, has avoided those pitfalls in this intriguing and thoroughly enjoyable portrait of two American icons and their experiences in and reactions to the cauldron of the Civil War. Both men reached their full political maturity during the 1850s, when the issue of slavery could no longer be ignored or compromised away. Although Lincoln lacked, at least publicly, Whitman's zeal for abolition, both saw the institution of slavery as a betrayal of America's best ideals. Once the war commenced and the casualties mounted, both men endured personal agonies as the maimed poured into Washington. In their efforts to find a deeper meaning, or even justification, for the carnage, Lincoln and Whitman seemed to touch upon the mystical. Finally, both men were blessed with the supreme gift of mastery of the English language, which they applied brilliantly to their own purposes while leaving their countrymen an eternal legacy. Jay Freeman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Review
"Daniel Mark Epstein [brings] to life with passionate vividness...the parallel lives of the president and the poet."
—The Wall Street Journal

“RIVETING…the book places its two subjects in uniquely sharp perspective. A compelling portrait of Lincoln and Whitman as contemporaries, as visionaries, and as Americans.”
-- The Baltimore Sun

“A pleasure to read. It’s…easy to be charmed by Epstein’s style.”
-- The Savannah Morning News

“VIVID…Lincoln and Whitman is nothing if not balanced. Epstein deftly traces the links between Whitman’s poems and Lincoln’s speeches…echoes that reverberate.”
-- Newsday

“There have not been many poet-biographers in this country…Epstein is part of [a] select company. Mr. Epstein’s new book shows that poetry is at the heart of what made both Lincoln, and the country great.”
-- The New York Sun

“Deftly written and carefully researched, this book uncovers fresh and often surprising connections between America's greatest poet and its greatest statesman. Epstein reveals a political side to Whitman and a literary side to Lincoln, finding new subtleties of character and skill in each of these towering figures. Along the way, he recreates nineteenth-century life in fascinating ways.”
--David S. Reynolds, author of the prize-winning Walt Whitman's America

“Perhaps only a writer who has produced both biography and poetry could have crafted such an illuminating, elegant book.  The scholarship is excellent, the ideas provocative, and the writing simply sublime.”
 --Harold Holzer, author of The Lincoln Image, and Co-Chairman of the U.S. Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission

“Combining biography and history, his ingeniously constructed double-narrative of personal development and national tragedy radiates humor, wonderment, and terror.”
-- Kenneth Silverman, Pulitzer prize-winning biographer and author of Lightning Man: The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse

“A revealing character study.”
-- Eric Foner, The Washington Post

“Epstein memorably evokes the look and feel of Washington during the Civil War, the eerily adjacent lives there of Walt Whitman and Abraham Lincoln, and the frantic events that issued in the murder of our greatest president and the writing of our greatest poem, ‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.’ Combining biography and history, his ingeniously constructed double narrative of personal development and national tragedy radiates humor, wonderment, and terror.” —KENNETH SILVERMAN, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Life and Times of Cotton Mather and Edgar A. Poe: Mournful Never-ending Remembrance

“Deftly written and carefully researched, this book uncovers fresh and often surprising connections between America’s greatest poet and its greatest statesman. Daniel Mark Epstein reveals a political side to Whitman and a literary side to Lincoln, finding new subtleties of character and skill in each of these towering figures. Along the way, he re-creates nineteenth-century life in fascinating ways.” —DAVID S. REYNOLDS, City University of New York, author of the prize-winning Walt Whitman’s America and Beneath the American Renaissance

“Perhaps only a writer who has produced both biography and poetry could have crafted such an illuminating, elegant book. The scholarship is excellent, the ideas provocative, and the writing simply sublime. Both Lincoln and Whitman—together with the long-vanished culture in which they lived—come vividly, sometimes startlingly, alive in Daniel Mark Epstein’s luminous prose.” —HAROLD HOLZER, author of The Lincoln Image and co-chairman of the U.S. Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission


Review
Epstein memorably evokes the look and feel of Washington during the Civil War, the eerily adjacent lives there of Walt Whitman and Abraham Lincoln, and the frantic events that issued in the murder of our greatest president and the writing of our greatest poem, When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom d. Combining biography and history, his ingeniously constructed double narrative of personal development and national tragedy radiates humor, wonderment, and terror.
KENNETH SILVERMAN, Pulitzer Prize winning author of
The Life and Times of Cotton Mather
and Edgar A. Poe: Mournful Never-ending Remembrance

Deftly written and carefully researched, this book uncovers fresh and often surprising connections between America's greatest poet and its greatest statesman. Daniel Mark Epstein reveals a political side to Whitman and a literary side to Lincoln, finding new subtleties of character and skill in each of these towering figures. Along the way, he re-creates nineteenth-century life in fascinating ways.
DAVID S. REYNOLDS,
City University of New York, author of the prize-winning
Walt Whitman's America and Beneath the American Renaissance

Perhaps only a writer who has produced both biography and poetry could have crafted such an illuminating, elegant book. The scholarship is excellent, the ideas provocative, and the writing simply sublime. Both Lincoln and Whitman together with the long-vanished culture in which they lived come vividly, sometimes startlingly, alive in Daniel Mark Epstein's luminous prose.
HAROLD HOLZER, author of The Lincoln Image
and co-chairman of the U.S. Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission


From the Inside Flap
It was more than coincidence—indeed, it was all but fate—that the lives and thoughts of Abraham Lincoln and Walt Whitman should converge during the terrible years of the Civil War. Kindred spirits despite their profound differences in position and circumstance, Lincoln and Whitman shared a vision of the democratic character that sprang from the deepest part of their being. They had read or listened to each other’s words at crucial turning points in their lives. Both were utterly transformed by the tragedy of the war. In this radiant book, poet and biographer Daniel Mark Epstein tracks the parallel lives of these two titans from the day that Lincoln first read Leaves of Grass to the elegy Whitman composed after Lincoln’s assassination in 1865.

Drawing on the rich trove of personal and newspaper accounts, diary records, and lore that has accumulated around both the president and the poet, Epstein structures his double portrait in a series of dramatic, atmospheric scenes. Whitman, though initially skeptical of the Illinois Republican, became enthralled when Lincoln stopped in New York on the way to his first inauguration. During the war years, after Whitman moved to Washington to minister to wounded soldiers, the poet’s devotion to the president developed into a passion bordering on obsession. “Lincoln is particularly my man, and by the same token, I am Lincoln’s man.”

As Epstein shows, the influence and reverence flowed both ways. Lincoln had been deeply immersed in Whitman’s verse when he wrote his incendiary “House Divided” speech, and Whitman remained an influence during the darkest years of the war. But their mutual impact went beyond the intellectual. Epstein brings to life the many friends and contacts his heroes shared—Lincoln’s debonair private secretary John Hay, the fiery abolitionist senator Charles Sumner, the mysterious and possibly dangerous Polish Count Gurowski—as he unfolds the story of their legendary encounters in New York City and especially Washington during the war years.

Blending history, biography, and a deeply informed appreciation of Whitman’s verse and Lincoln’s rhetoric, Epstein has written a masterful and original portrait of two great men and the era they shaped through the vision they held in common.


From the Back Cover
"Epstein memorably evokes the look and feel of Washington during the Civil War, the eerily adjacent lives there of Walt Whitman and Abraham Lincoln, and the frantic events that issued in the murder of our greatest president and the writing of our greatest poem, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” Combining biography and history, his ingeniously constructed double-narrative of personal development and national tragedy radiates humor, wonderment, and terror." -Kenneth Silverman, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Life and Times of Cotton Mather and Edgar A Poe : Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance
“Deftly written and carefully researched, this book uncovers fresh and often surprising connections between America's greatest poet and its greatest statesman. Daniel Mark Epstein reveals a political side to Whitman and a literary side to Lincoln, finding new subtleties of character and skill in each of these towering figures. Along the way, he recreates nineteenth-century life in fascinating ways.” -David S. Reynolds, City University of New York, author of the prize-winning Walt Whitman's America and Beneath the American Renaissance
“Perhaps only a writer who has produced both biography and poetry could have crafted such an illuminating, elegant book. The scholarship is excellent, the ideas provocative, and the writing simply sublime. Both Lincoln and Whitman--together with the long-vanished culture in which they lived--come vividly, sometimes startlingly, alive in Daniel Mark Epstein's luminous prose.” -Harold Holzer, author of The Lincoln Image, and Co-Chairman of the U.S. Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission


About the Author
Daniel Mark Epstein is the author of highly acclaimed biographies of Aimee Semple McPherson, Nat King Cole, and Edna St. Vincent Millay, as well as seven volumes of poetry. His verse has appeared in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and The Paris Review, among other national publications. Epstein lives in Baltimore.


Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 1

SPRINGFIELD, 1857

Abraham Lincoln's law partner William "Billy" Herndon, thirty-nine, loved the birds and wildflowers of the prairie, pretty women, and corn liquor. He also had an immoderate passion for new books, and for the transcendental philosophizing of pastor Theodore Parker and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson. By his own accounting he had spent four thousand dollars on his collection of poetry, philosophy, and belles lettres-a fortune in those days, when a good wood-frame house in Springfield, Illinois, cost half as much. Journalist George Alfred Townsend called Herndon's library the finest in the West.

Herndon's narrow, earnest-looking face was fringed with whiskers in the Scots manner, and his eyes were close-set, intense. His favorite philosopher-poet was Emerson. Herndon so admired the Sage of Concord that he purchased Emerson's books by the carton and gave them away to friends and strangers with the zeal of an evangelist. A backwoods philosopher, Herndon even solicited Emerson's endorsement for his tract "Some Hints on the Mind," in which he claimed to have discovered the mind's fundamental principle, "if not its law."

So when Emerson espoused a new book of poetry, calling it "the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed," Herndon wasted no time in locating a copy, which could be found on the shelves of R. Blanchard's, Booksellers, in Chicago, where he frequently traveled on business.

Having held the olive-green book, its cover blind-stamped with leaves and berries; having regarded with a twinge of envy the salutation "I Greet You at the / Beginning of A / Great Career / R W Emerson," gold-stamped on the spine, the bibliophile-lawyer plunked down his golden dollar for the second edition of Whitman's Leaves of Grass. And knowing the storm the book had caused in more sophisticated circles, Herndon brought the brickbat-shaped volume to the office he shared with Lincoln and set it in clear view on the table, where anyone might pick up the book and thumb through it. Leaves of Grass was exactly the length of a man's hand. He laid it down on the baize-covered table with the complacence of an anarchist waiting for a bomb to explode.

The Lincoln-Herndon law office was on the second floor of a brick building on the west side of Springfield's main square, across from the courthouse. Visitors mounted a flight of stairs and passed down a dark hallway to a medium-sized room in the rear of the building. The upper half of the door had a pane of beveled glass, with a curtain hanging from a wire, on brass rings. Lincoln would unlock the door, open it, and draw the curtain as he closed the door behind him. Two dusty windows overlooked the alley.

Herndon's biographer David Donald describes the office as "a center of political activity, of gossip and friendly banter, and of such remote problems as the merits of Walt Whitman's poetry."

The office was untidy and cobwebbed. Once, after Lincoln had come home from Congress with the customary dole of seeds to distribute to farmers, John Littlefield, a law student, discovered while sweeping that some of the stray wheat seeds had sprouted in the cracks between the floorboards. A long pine table that divided the room, and met with a shorter table to make a T, was scored by the jackknives of absent-minded clerks and clients. In one corner stood a secretary desk, its many pigeonholes and drawers stuffed with letters and memoranda, its besieged surface sustaining a spattered earthenware inkwell and a few gold pens. Bookcases rose between the tall windows. A spidery black stain blotted one wall, at the height of a man's head, where an ink bottle had exploded-the memento, according to Lincoln, of a disagreement between law students over a point of jurisprudence that would not yield to cold logic.

Papers were strewn everywhere, as if by a prairie wind: on the table, on the floor, on the five scattered cane-bottomed chairs and the ragged sofa where the senior partner of the firm liked to stretch out his full length, his head on the arm of the sofa. His legs were too long to fit the settee, so Lincoln would rest his feet on the raveling cane seat of a chair. There he reclined every morning, after arriving at nine, clean-shaven. And he would read, aloud. He read newspapers and books, always aloud, much to the annoyance of his partner, who found the high, tuneful voice, with its chuckling interludes and asides, a distraction from the warrants and writs and invoices. Herndon once asked Lincoln why he had to read aloud, and the forty-eight-year-old ex-Congressman explained: "Two senses catch the idea: first I see what I read; second I hear it, and therefore I can remember it better." Lincoln-not boasting-said that his mind was like steel: the gray matter was difficult to scratch, but once engraved on it, information was nearly impossible to efface. According to Herndon, Lincoln did not read many books, but whatever he did read he absorbed completely.

The law students got to Whitman first. Perhaps they had read about Leaves of Grass in Putnam's Monthly Magazine, where the eminent Charles Eliot Norton had announced that words "banished from polite society are here employed without reserve" and called the book a curious mixture of "Yankee Transcendentalism and New York rowdyism"; or they might have caught notice of it in the New York Criterion, where the dyspeptic Rufus Griswold referred to it as "this gathering of muck." In America's most influential literary journal, the North American Review, Edward Everett Hale rhapsodized about Leaves of Grass. And in May 1856 no less an authority than Fanny Fern-the highest-paid columnist in the country-referred to Whitman in the New York Ledger as "this glorious Native American." The book was widely praised and condemned, much discussed, if not much purchased or read.

According to Henry Bascom Rankin, who was a student in the Lincoln-Herndon office in 1857, "discussions hot and extreme sprung up between office students and Mr. Herndon concerning its poetic merit." A few verses:

I mind how we lay in June, such a transparent summer morning,

You settled your head athwart my hips and gently turned over upon me,

And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to my bare-stript heart . . .

I turn the bridegroom out of bed and stay with the bride myself,

I tighten her all night to my thighs and lips.

Poetry indeed! These long, racy, unrhymed verses did not look like any poetry the provincial law students had ever seen, no matter what Emerson or the bluestocking Fanny Fern wrote.

The talk of Whitman that animated the law office during the unseasonably warm spring of 1857 relieved the furious, anguished discussion of the Supreme Court's recent decision about Dred Scott, which aroused Lincoln from a spell of political torpor. Yet even Scott's fate led them back to Leaves of Grass:

I am the hounded slave, I wince at the bite of the dogs,

Hell and despair are upon me, crack and again crack the marksmen,

I clutch the rails of the fence, my gore dribs, thinned with the ooze of my skin . . .

The argument over Whitman did not differ much in Springfield from the dispute in Boston and New York. Was this poetry? Then there arose the livelier controversy over the book's brazen immodesty. Was Leaves of Grass indecent? Many of the verses sounded shameless, unfit for mixed company. Take for example the anonymous woman watching twenty-eight young men bathing by the shore, who comes "Dancing and laughing along the beach" to caress their naked bellies:

They do not know who puffs and declines with pendant and bending arch,

They do not think whom they souse with spray.

Was this Walt Whitman actually depicting a sexual act outlawed everywhere but in the debaters' dreams? It was shocking, pornographic. The men wondered whether such a book should be allowed on library shelves, or in homes where women and children might casually be seduced by it. Who was responsible for the corruption of morals: the author, the printer, the Chicago bookseller, or buyers of Leaves of Grass like Billy Herndon?

The students wrangled, and read the poems aloud, with Herndon sometimes acting as Whitman's advocate, other times as an impartial referee. Visitors dropping by, such as Dr. Newton Bateman, superintendent of schools, would join in the discussion provoked by lines such as:

A woman waits for me-she contains all, nothing is lacking,

Yet all were lacking if sex were lacking, or if the moisture of the right man were lacking.

Lincoln worked quietly at his desk, raking his coarse hair with his long fingers, or he came and went, apparently oblivious to the disturbance the new book was causing in the workplace. Having lost a year to politics, stumping for the Republican John Frémont during the presidential campaign of 1856, advocating "free soil, free labor and free men," he had a lot of catching up to do in his neglected law practice. He was also having a spell of depression, "the hypochondria," as it was called in those days. This mood afflicted him periodically, often between periods of intense business or creative work. So he turned his back on the students, and Herndon and Dr. Bateman, as they challenged one another's taste in literature and questioned one another's morals, reading passages of Leaves of Grass and attacking or defending Whitman as the spirit, or the letter, moved them. The poet was utterly uninhibited, whether he was describing himself, or addressing the President:

Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos,

Disorderly, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking, breeding,

No sentimentalist, no stander above men and women, or apart from

them-no more modest than immodest

. . .

I speak the pass-word primeval, I give the sign of democracy,

By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart

of on the same terms.

Have you outstript the rest? Are you the President?

It is a trifle-they will more than arrive there every one, and still pass on.

One day, after the debaters had departed, a few clerks, including Henry Rankin, remained, copying documents. Lincoln rose from his desk. This was always a sight because sitting down Lincoln appeared to be of average height, but his limbs were so disproportionately long that when he unfolded and stretched them it was as if a giant had sprung up out of a common man.

"Quite a surprise occurred," Rankin recalled, in a memoir written years later. Lincoln picked up the book of poems that had been disturbing the peace and began to read, as he rarely did, in devoted silence, for more than half an hour by the Regulator clock. When the pressure of perusing the poetry silently became more than Lincoln could endure, he thumbed back to the first pages of Leaves of Grass and began reading aloud, in that tenderly expressive voice with the Kentucky accent and continual undercurrent of whimsical humor.

I celebrate myself,

And what I assume you shall assume,

For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my soul,

I lean and loafe at my ease, observing a spear of summer grass.

The light of afternoon streamed through the office windows, gilding the dust motes.

Houses and rooms are full of perfumes-the shelves are crowded with perfumes,

I breathe the fragrance myself, and know it and like it,

The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it.

The atmosphere is not a perfume, it has no taste of the distillation, it is odorless,

It is for my mouth forever, I am in love with it,

I will go to the bank by the wood, and become undisguised and naked,

I am mad for it to be in contact with me.

The smoke of my own breath,

Echos, ripples, buzzed whispers, love-root, silk-thread, crotch, vine

My respiration and inspiration, the beating of my heart . . .

"His rendering," Rankin remembered, "revealed a charm of new life in Whitman's versification." Here and there Lincoln found a verse too coarse, a line or phrase he felt the poet might have avoided. But on the whole he "commended the new poet's verses for their virility, freshness, unconventional sentiments, and unique forms of expression."

Lincoln put the book back down on the office table, desiring Herndon to leave Whitman there where he might not get lost in the tide of books, newspapers, and documents. "Time and again, when Lincoln came in, or was leaving, he would pick it up, as if to glance at it for only a moment, but instead he would often settle down in a chair and never stop reading aloud such verses or pages as he fancied."

Once Lincoln made the mistake of taking Leaves of Grass home. The next morning he brought the book back, grimly remarking that he "had barely saved it from being purified in fire by the women." This anecdote goes a long way toward explaining the politician's lifelong reticence about the poet and his book. Of course, by "the women" he meant his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, who controlled nearly everything that went on inside the big, two-story house at the corner of Eighth and Jackson where they lived with their three boys.

It is uncertain what verses or pages Lincoln fancied. The feuds among Lincoln's early biographers, struggling over the soul of the martyred President, have few parallels in American letters. In 1928 a rival biographer, Reverend William E. Barton, in a popular book that took pains to disassociate Lincoln from Whitman, challenged Rankin's memory. As early as 1932, however, the scholar Charles Glicksberg, in Whitman and the Civil War, declared that Barton's book was "marked throughout by a hostile spirit toward Whitman" and discredited Barton's premise that Lincoln was unaware of Whitman's existence. Modern scholars, such as Whitman biographers Gay Wilson Allen and Jerome Loving, and David Herbert Donald, who wrote books on both Herndon and Lincoln, likewise have accepted Rankin's story in spite of Reverend Barton.

One of the points that authenticate Rankin's account is his dating of Lincoln's encounter with Leaves of Grass. Only in that year, two years after the first publication of Whitman's poems in 1855, would the ex-Congressman and future President Lincoln have had the freedom and inclination to study such a literary curiosity. Only in 1857 could the reading of Whitman have produced such an impact on his oratory.

Billy Herndon, who knew Lincoln better perhaps than any man in Lincoln's day, said he was the rare man without vices, but with a flagrant disregard for propriety, "the appropriateness of things." He was so heedless of his appearance that he forgot to comb his coarse black hair. He cared so little about clothing that sometimes he wouldn't wear this piece or that. After all, he was raised on a farm in Kentucky, barefoot. "He never could see the harm in wearing a sack-coat instead of a swallowtail to an evening party, nor could he realize the offense of telling a vulgar yarn if a preacher happened to be present."

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Kindred spirits despite their profound differences in position and circumstance, Lincoln and Whitman shared a vision of the democratic character that sprang from the deepest part of their being. They had read or listened to each other's words at crucial turning points in their lives. Both were utterly transformed by the tragedy of the war. In this book, poet and biographer Daniel Mark Epstein tracks the parallel lives of these two titans from the day that Lincoln first read Leaves of Grass to the elegy Whitman composed after Lincoln's assassination in 1865.

Drawing on the rich trove of personal and newspaper accounts, diary records, and lore that has accumulated around both the President and the poet, Epstein structures his double portrait in a series of dramatic, atmospheric scenes. Epstein brings to life the many friends and contacts his heroes shared - Lincoln's debonair private secretary, John Hay, the fiery abolitionist senator Charles Sumner, the mysterious and possibly dangerous Polish Count Gurowski - as he unfolds the story of their legendary encounters in New York City and especially Washington during the war years.

FROM THE CRITICS

The Baltimore Sun

Epstein, a Baltimore biographer, magazine writer and poet has yoked Lincoln and Whitman in a detailed narrative sure to please the vast audience that both men justly command. The books is a fine combination of biography, history, and literary criticism, with several quirky excursions into the mysteries of the two men￯﾿ﾽs lives and loves.

The New Yorker

During the final two years of the Civil War, Walt Whitman lived in a Spartan rented room a few rutted blocks north of the White House. The poet and the President who inspired his most popular poem (“O Captain! My Captain!”) and his most beautiful (“When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”) never met. But Whitman often planted himself along the route of Lincoln’s carriage as it rattled to the President’s summer retreat, and the two men would exchange grave, friendly nods. Years later, Whitman, palsied but still Jovian, lectured about the great man to a Gilded Age audience that included Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, Andrew Carnegie, and General Sherman. Epstein, an accomplished poet as well as a biographer, imbues his tale of two lives with a natural sense of detail and period that revivifies the familiar figures he writes about.

Publishers Weekly

Poet and biographer Epstein (What Lips My Lips Have Kissed, about Edna St. Vincent Millay) covers the same ground canvassed most recently, and more ably, by Roy Morris Jr. in his much-praised The Better Angel: Walt Whitman in the Civil War. Where Epstein falters is in his basic paradigm: a narrative that insists on interleaving the "parallel"-but never intersecting-lives of Abraham Lincoln and Walt Whitman. The two never met. They shared no common ground in politics-Whitman, a copperhead Democrat, a bigot and no abolitionist, thought the Northern cause in the Civil War absurd. That Lincoln read and was impressed by Leaves of Grass is questioned by most scholars, yet Epstein takes it on face value. Later, moved by the tragic drama of the president's murder, Whitman wrote two elegiac poems ("When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" and "Captain, My Captain"). His subsequent "Specimen Days and Collect" included diary memoranda referring to glimpses of Lincoln around Washington, and in old age the impoverished Whitman sometimes raised money for himself by giving talks containing his reminiscences of Lincoln and wartime Washington. But the "parallels" between these two very different lives don't hold together the thread of Epstein's narrative. As well, readers well versed in the story of Whitman and his milieu during the early 1860s will be annoyed by several small errors. (Example: The New York poet and farmer Myron Benton was not a friend of Whitman's, though he was a fan of the poet's and had a mutual friend in John Burroughs.) (Feb.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Beginning with Abraham Lincoln's fascination with Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, the author uses Lincoln's activities in the nation's capital as a backdrop for the story of Whitman's life there during the Civil War. Working as a copy clerk, Whitman spent most of his free time comforting wounded Union soldiers. A dedicated Lincoln admirer, he also planned his walks around the city to coincide with the President's carriage rides, often waving to Lincoln as he watched him pass. The closest the poet came to the President was to see him from an adjoining room in the White House. As Whitman published his book of poetry Drum-Taps, Lincoln was assassinated. Whitman's grief led to his poems "When Lilacs Last in the Door-Yard Bloom'd" and "O Captain, My Captain." Both are included here, along with brief interpretations. The author's premise that there is value in juxtaposing the lives of a famous president and a poet is not supported. There is not enough evidence of a strong connection between the two men to warrant a book on the subject. Epstein (author of biographies of Aimee Semple McPherson, Nat King Cole, and Edna St. Vincent Millay, as well as a number of books of poetry) emphasizes literary aspects rather than historical ones. A marginal purchase that only libraries with Whitman collections need consider. (Illustrations not seen.)-Grant A. Fredericksen, Illinois Prairie Dist. P.L., Metamora Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews