[New-Poetry] Lincoln's love of poetry

[Rsgwynn1 at cs.com]

Thank god that Lincoln didn't live long enough to read Carl Sandburg, but he 
grew up with Shakespeare and Milton and, as the article notes, wrote verse 
himself (as did George Washington and John Quincy Adams; Jefferson apparently 
didn't but wrote a very perceptive essay on English prosody for a French friend). 
 By some strange fate, a copy of the first edition of Leaves of Grass 
apparently found its way to Springfield, where Lincoln was fond of quoting it to 
Herndon.

I often point out to my students that Lincoln's Gettysburg Address is, with 
very minor tweaks, blank verse, as is a lyrical passage (a soliloquy) from 
Frederick Douglass's autobiography (where he apostrophizes ships on the 
Chesapeake).  Douglass trained himself as an orator by reading and reciting from a 
popular anthology of the times, The Columbian Orator, so I suspect his own "verse" 
is more premeditated than Lincoln's (given that Lincoln apparently wrote TGA 
is a short time).  Still, Lincoln managed to retain the rhythms of the poets he 
read and admired in his own oratory: "Four score and seven years ago our 
fathers . . . ."  Perfect I5.   Incidentally, there are many famous lines from The 
Declaration of Independence that are pure I5: "We hold these truths to be 
self-evident" "Our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor."  Franklin also 
wrote verse; I'm not sure that Adams did, but he certainly read a lot of it.  A 
lot of this may not be conscious, but those who have loved and "absorbed" blank 
verse remember it: "That we have nothing to fear but fear itself."
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