Wikipedia:Today's featured article/December 22, 2021

The poem as it appears in Leaves of Grass (1871)

"This Dust Was Once the Man" is an elegy poem written by Walt Whitman in 1871. The poem is dedicated to Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president of the United States, whom Whitman greatly admired. The poem was written six years after Lincoln's assassination in April 1865 at the hands of John Wilkes Booth. Whitman had written three previous poems about Lincoln, all in 1865: "O Captain! My Captain!", "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd", and "Hush'd Be the Camps To-Day". The poem has not attracted much individual attention, though it was generally positively received and has been analyzed several times, generally as an epitaph for Lincoln. The poem describes Lincoln as having saved the union of the United States from "the foulest crime in history", a line for which conflicting interpretations exist. It is generally seen as referring to either the secession of the Confederate States of America or the assassination of Lincoln. (This article is part of a featured topic: Walt Whitman and Abraham Lincoln.)