Guest Author - Linda Sue Grimes

The sixteenth president of the United States admired poetry so much that he once quipped that he would give everything he owned and even incur debt to able to write a poem as good as his favorite poem. That favorite poem was written by William Knox, and its title was “Mortality.” Lincoln had encountered the poem in a newspaper but the poet’s name had not been published, so the president never knew who wrote it.

Lincoln actually wrote poems himself. The following is the first stanza of part one of “My Childhood Home I See Again”:

My childhood's home I see again,
And sadden with the view;
And still, as memory crowds my brain,
There's pleasure in it too.

It continues for nine more stanzas in part one, and then thirteen stanzas in part two. Part two focuses on Matthew Gentry. Lincoln explained to his friend Andrew Johnston why he included Matthew Gentry in his poem:

He is three years older than I, and when we were boys we went to school together. He was rather a bright lad, and the son of the rich man of our poor neighborhood. At the age of nineteen he unaccountably became furiously mad, from which condition he gradually settled down into harmless insanity. When, as I told you in my other letter I visited my old home in the fall of 1844, I found him still lingering in this wretched condition. In my poetizing mood I could not forget the impression his case made upon me.

Lincoln’s personality naturally lent itself to musing and melancholy which because of the keen focus on emotion resulted in his “poetizing mood.” While not usually known for his poetry, Lincoln is known for his other writings, especially the Gettysburg Address, which is profoundly poetic.

Poets have found the first Republican president to be a good subject for their poems. Walt Whitman’s “O Captain! My Captain!” is a famous example of a poem taking Abraham Lincoln’s death as the subject. Also Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd,” an innovative pastoral elegy, is a celebration of mourning, as it follows the coffin from Washington, DC to Springfield, Illinois.

The Illinois poet Vachel Lindsay also paid tribute to Lincoln in “Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight” and “Lincoln.” In “Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight” Lindsay captures Lincoln’s brooding melancholy as the poet has the president walking through Springfield: “It is portentous, and a thing of state / That here at midnight, in our little town / A mourning figure walks, and will not rest, / Near the old court-house pacing up and down.” And in “Lincoln” Lindsay sets forth an ideal and a call for us to try to emulate the fine qualities of the late president:

Would I might rouse the Lincoln in you all,
That which is gendered in the wilderness
From lonely prairies and God’s tenderness.
Imperial soul, star of a weedy stream,
Born where the ghosts of buffaloes still dream,
Whose spirit hoof-beats storm above his grave,
Above that breast of earth and prairie-fire—
Fire that freed the slave.

Another Illinois poet, Carl Sandburg, whose poems about Chicago gained him much acclaim, paid high tribute to Lincoln not only in poems (“Cool Tombs,” “The People, Yes,” and “Knucks”), but Sandburg also wrote a six-volume biography of Lincoln: the first two volumes called Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years appeared in 1926, and remaining four volumes titled Abraham Lincoln: The War Years appeared in 1939. In 1940 Sandburg was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for the four-volume Abraham Lincoln: The War Years.

Additional poets who have chosen Lincoln for a subject are William Cullen Bryant, James Russell Lowell, Edwin Markham, Edgar Lee Masters, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Witter Bynner, and many others. And it is certainly fitting that a president who loved poetry so much and whose writing exhibited such poetic qualities and whose mind was very much a poet has been so attractive to poets down through the decades.

Without a doubt the history of the United States has been deeply affected by Abraham Lincoln’s presidency. His statesmanship steered America in a direction toward strength and peace. His life is certainly one to emulate. And the poets have not failed to notice.

For further information about Abraham Lincoln and poetry:
Abraham Lincoln’s Favorite Poem
Poetry Written by Abraham Lincoln
“O Captain! My Captain!”
“When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloom’d”
“Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight”
Poems about Lincoln

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Books by Linda Sue Grimes:
Jiggery-Jee's Eden Valley Stories
Singing in the Silence: Poems of Faith
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