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Why did Walt Whitman write poems mourning Abraham Lincoln?

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“Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos” — Walt Whitman American poet Walt Whitman, photograph by Mathew Brady.

Walt Whitman wrote poems mourning Abraham Lincoln because he deeply admired the president, whom he viewed as the "great martyr chief" of democracy.123

Following the American Civil War, Whitman was profoundly affected by the assassination of Abraham Lincoln in 1865. His elegies, most notably "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d" and "O Captain! My Captain!", were written to express his personal grief and his horror at the loss of a leader who had guided the Union through the conflict. These works also served to reflect his broader revulsion toward the brutality and waste of war, capturing the collective mourning of a nation that had just emerged from a devastating period of internal strife.413