In the poem "When Lilacs Last In The Dooryard Bloom'd", by Walt Whitman, three important symbols are introduced. These symbols of a star, the lilac, and a bird exhibit Whitman's transcendentalism and serve as an allusion to Abraham Lincoln's life and death. Whitman's poetry, through these symbols, opens a window to the prevailing social attitudes, moral beliefs, and cultural disposition of his time through his allusions to President Lincoln. To understand Whitman's poetry one must first know something about the poet himself.
             Walt Whitman was born on May 31, 1819 in Long Island New York. Whitman disliked the idea of becoming a carpenter like his father and opted to seek his own fortune. The publishing of Leaves of Grass, Whitman's major literary work, was a major turning point in Whitman's life. "Before, he was a teacher, printer, journalist, carpenter, and more. After, no matter what else he did, he was a poet" (Wiener 14). Whitman's strong opposition to slavery gave him problems later on as in life. Langston Hughes relates when he says "[Whitman] had been an editor of the Brooklyn Eagle, but was fired there in 1948, because he refused to support Governor Cass of Michigan who advocated the continuation of slavery"(Wiener 196). Whitman greatly influenced many people of his time period but also was influenced by other writers. Russell Blankenship, a professor at the University of Washington, relates this fact when he says that Whitman was "influenced by the revered American writer and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson" (Wiener 106). Emerson is commonly known as a transcendentalist. A transcendentalist is a person who is "idealistic and optimistic. They believed they could find answers to whatever they were seeking. All they had to do was learn to read, through their intuition, the external symbols of nature and translate them into spiritu...