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Abe Lincoln and Poetry

© 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:

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