Walt Whitman's lectures on Abraham Lincoln

The American poet Walt Whitman gave a lecture on Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president of the United States, several times between 1879 and 1890. The lecture centered on the assassination of Lincoln, but also covered years leading up to and during the American Civil War and often included readings of poems such as "O Captain! My Captain!". The deliveries were generally well received, and cemented Whitman's public image as an authority on Lincoln.

Whitman greatly admired Lincoln and was moved by his assassination in 1865 to write several poems in the President's memory. The idea of a lecture on the topic was first proposed by his friend John Burroughs in an 1878 letter. Whitman, who had long aspired to be a lecturer, first spoke on the death of Lincoln in New York City's Steck Hall on April 14 the following year. Over the next eleven years, he delivered the lecture at least ten, and possibly as many as twenty, more times.

Many deliveries of the lecture were part of a broader speaker series or fundraising events. A delivery of the lecture in 1887 at Madison Square Theatre is considered the most successful presentation. Whitman's biographer Justin Kaplan writes that this delivery and the reception that followed was the closest Whitman came to "social eminence on a large scale",^[1] as it was attended by many prominent members of American society. Whitman later described that lecture and reception as "the culminating hour" of his life,^[1] but at another time criticized it as "too much the New York Jamboree".^[2] He gave the lecture for the last time in Philadelphia in 1890, two years before his death.