Song of Myself

"When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d" by Walt Whitman (1865)

While “Song of Myself” is propelled forward by a powerful sense of optimism and faith in the American experiment, Whitman was not naïve about the sincere threats to democracy in his day. “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” is Whitman’s elegy for President Lincoln, who was assassinated on April 14, 1865, just days after the Civil War ended. Like John Milton’s Lycidas and Percy Shelley’s Adonais, “When Lilacs” is a pastoral elegy. It uses images in nature (like lilacs, the planet Venus, and a thrush) to mourn and, finally, to accept death. Whitman also mourned Lincoln in another of his most famous poems, “O Captain! My Captain!”.

"I, Too" by Langston Hughes (1925)

Langton Hughes was an important poet of the Harlem Renaissance, a period of artistic and intellectual revival for the African American community in the 1920s and 30s. A direct response to Whitman’s democratic dinner invitation in Section 19 of “Song of Myself,” “I, Too” reminds Whitman (and the rest of white society) that though slavery had technically ended, the promised feast of equality has not yet come to pass. “I am the darker brother,” he writes.