Poet and teacher David Biespel presents a lecture "Of Love and War: Abraham Lincoln and Walt Whitman" ...

Whitman's great elegy for Lincoln, 'When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd,' forever links the two men. Defining a tragic moment in American history, the poem reminds us that a public death can touch an individual life and that poetry can simultaneously express praise and loss through the subject of love and war.

It also links composer Paul Hindemith to them, who set the poem to an extraordinary composition in honor of FDR's death. I cannot read the poem without hearing the music. It is my favorite choral symphony and the only such piece in anyone's repertoire associated with the Civil War. (It even has bugle calls, nicely understated.)

Whitman + Lincoln + Hindemith = Staggering. Maybe Amazon has a sample sound file somewhere.