When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd

“The Waste Land“ by T.S. Eliot (1922)

In one of his best-known and most influential works, Eliot begins with lilacs in April in Part I, introduces the song of the hermit thrush in Part V, bookending the poem with the images of death and artistic translation from Whitman’s poem. Part V of “The Waste Land” also echoes “Lilacs” when asking “who is the third who walks always beside you,” calling up Canto 14: “Then with the knowledge of death as walking on one side of me […]” (Canto 14, Lines 13-14).

“Kaddish“ by Allen Ginsberg (1957)

Allen Ginsberg’s extended poem of mourning demonstrates Whitman’s influence in its extended descriptions of place, its long, expansive lines, and its chant-like anaphora. Ginsberg acknowledges Whitman’s influence on his poetry and even made Whitman a character in his poem “A Supermarket in California.”

“Lincoln is Dead“ by George Moses Horton (1865)

George Moses Horton, the first American to publish a book while enslaved, wrote several poems on Lincoln’s assassination. In this poem, contemporary to Whitman’s tribute, Horton compares Lincoln to another celestial body in the west—the setting sun. Horton left North Carolina with Union troops in 1865, liberated by the Emancipation Proclamation.