Whitman’s elegy When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed fuses personal grief with collective mourning. How does Whitman’s use of anaphora and symbolic natural imagery subvert traditional epic conventions?
1
By employing irony to mock political leaders
2
By replacing heroic martial glory with intimate, cyclical natural processes as a source of transcendence
3
By avoiding any political allusion
4
By adopting classical allusions without innovation