Walt Whitman wrote this poem soon after the death of President Abraham Lincoln. This poem is considered an elegy, which is a poem of deep reflection, “a song or poem expressing sorrow or lamentation especially for one who is dead” (Merriam-Webster). In his 1856 political tract, The Eighteenth Presidency!, Whitman expressed disgust with the rampantly corrupt American political landscape and called for a “Redeemer President of These States,” who would come out of “the real West, the log hut, the clearing, the woods, the prairie, the hillside” (Reynolds). Lincoln was exactly who Whitman was looking for. Whitman spent most of the Civil War in Washington, D.C. He was a government worker, a clerk, and he also volunteered as a nurse at local hospitals.