In the 1850s, Walt Whitman was not seen as a major American poet—yet. He had published two editions of his collection Leaves of Grass, which was a tribute to New York City despite its rural-sounding title. But he made his living as a newspaperman. Like many young men who grew up poor, he had finished elementary school and then been apprenticed to a printer. Given this training, journalism was a logical career choice. And given his writing skill, he had moved quickly from setting type to editing and reporting. New York City was the nation’s newspaper capital, publishing more than 150 papers, large and small. Some, like the New-York Tribune, the New-York Herald, and the New-York Times, were powerful dailies that were read all over the country. Whitman concentrated on smaller journals, and he wrote for more than a dozen of them. He covered many topics, but he especially loved anything related to street life in the city, which he celebrated with exuberant, rapid-fire prose. He wanted all of his writing, including his poems, to sound like the world he was describing.Whitman also tackled the political question that was threatening to rip the nation apart. His views on slavery were moderate. He saw it as evil, and in the 1840s he founded a free-soil newspaper, the Brooklyn Freeman, to argue against the spread of slavery to the territories. But he believed that runaway slaves should be returned to their masters because the law required it. In the late 1850s, as the pro- and antislavery forces became more extreme and more divided, he looked for a middle-of-the-road candidate who might be able to keep the nation from war. After briefly backing Stephen A. Douglas for president, he threw his support behind Abraham Lincoln. He was not present for Lincoln’s speech at Cooper Union in 1860, but he was in the crowd that turned out when Lincoln came to New York on his way to his inauguration. At other stops, the president-elect had been noisily welcomed, but in New York, 30,000 to 40,000 people stood on the streets in dead silence: “not a voice—not a sound,” Whitman wrote. This icy greeting served as a reminder that New York City was not in Lincoln’s camp.At a time when poets and writers often came from America’s wealthiest families, Whitman was unusual, a poor boy without much formal education who wrote about the lives of ordinary men and women. He saw events—even dramatic, national events—from the perspective of the everyday people who lived through them. This natural inclination became even more important to his poems and his life following a frightening experience in his family. A week before Christmas 1862, the Whitmans read a newspaper list of soldiers who had been wounded in battle. One of the names, they were sure, was a misspelling of George Whitman, the name of one of Walt Whitman’s brothers. Within hours, Walt was on his way from New York to the army hospitals in Washington, D.C., to look for his injured brother.After a desperate two-day search, Walt learned that George’s wound had been minor, and that he was still with his regiment. Walt was able to travel to the battlefield in Fredericksburg, Virginia, and the two brothers spent a few days together. For Walt, it was a close-up view of war that he never forgot. He saw gruesome evidence of the terrible wounds the soldiers had suffered. He saw how young, scared, and lonely they were. And though he had no medical training, he spent the remainder of the war visiting the wounded in Washington’s hospitals, offering sympathy and words of encouragement. He wrote a number of poems about the cost of war for those who fight it and for their families.Whitman was in Brooklyn with his family when he read news of Lincoln’s assassination. He went across to Manhattan and walked along Broadway in the rain, writing that everything was draped in black, even the windows. He returned to Washington, D.C., three days after the president’s death, but he did not stand in line to see the body lying in state, and he did not hear the funeral sermon. He turned to poetry to mark his grief. He wrote “Hush’d Be the Camps To-day,” his first Lincoln poem. Not surprisingly, he focused on the feelings of soldiers who have lost “our dear commander.” Over the next months, Whitman wrote two other poems about Lincoln. “O Captain! My Captain!” has rhyming lines, which set it apart from his other verse. It was the only success Whitman had during his lifetime, and he was asked to read it often. It seemed to capture Americans’ simple and powerful reaction to the president’s death.Whitman’s great masterpiece is his long elegy to Lincoln, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” In the wake of the assassination, newspapers reported that sprays of lilacs had surrounded Lincoln’s coffin, and lilac bushes were blooming in profusion all around Washington at the time of the funeral. For Whitman, these flowers and the night sky in springtime were forever associated with his memories of the fallen president. In Whitman’s stately poem, Lincoln is not presented as a saint or a god. He is “the sweetest, wisest soul,” the nation’s stolen leader, and a better man than most, but a man. For grieving readers, he represented all the deaths of this long and brutal war.