On "of De Witt Williams on his
way to Lincoln Cemetery"
Recall for a
moment De Witt Williams, as he visits in death the haunts of a youth that, after Brooks's
treatment cannot remain ill-spent. There is
no small freight of literariness in the parody of the interstate journey of Lincoln's bier
recorded in Whitman's "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed" and the skewed
identification effected by the substitution of "Nothing but a plain black boy"
for "Coming for to carry me home" of the spiritual's second line.
Lindberg, Kathryne V. "Whose Canon? Gwendolyn Books: Founder at the Center of the 'Margins.'" Gendered Modernisms: American Women Poets and Their Readers. Ed. Margaret Dickie and Thomas Travisano. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1996. 283-311.
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