Poetic Grief-Work in Whitman's "Lilacs"

Jeffrey Steele

doi:10.13008/2153-3695.1078

Essays

Poetic Grief-Work in Whitman's "Lilacs"

Abstract

Offers a reading of "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," emphasizing the poet's "progressive re-engagement with sensuous reality" and arguing that "the Poet's grief-work consists of a series of operations which ritually reappropriate the world, a world now tinged with death" and that the poem places "symbols of grief within an ongoing life-process."

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How to Cite: Steele, J. (1984) “Poetic Grief-Work in Whitman's "Lilacs"”, Walt Whitman Quarterly Review. 2(3). doi: https://doi.org/10.13008/2153-3695.1078