Saturday morning, January 23, 2021.
It’s good we have a president who loves and reads poetry. It’s good we have a president who quotes Lincoln and actually reveres him and sees him as someone to strive to emulate rather than a brand name to use to sell his own brand, flatter his own vanity, and, conversely, feel sorry for himself. But as the Washington Post’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book critic Carlos Lozada mused, with a sad rhetorical shake of the head, when you know who was still in the White House with a good chance of remaining there:
Yes, I would be delighted if our president read more books, even more so if they were good ones. But of the many concerns I have about Trump, a thin [To Be Read] pile is not one of them. I’d settle for him reading his briefing material. Or the Constitution.
But it’s worth reminding ourselves that, in Lincoln, we had a president who not only read, loved, and recited poetry, and learned how to speak in public and write for the public from it, but used it, one poet’s work in particular, to help him understand how the world worked and his own place and role in it:
Lincoln found that Shakespeare’s universal appeal lay in his depiction of shared human qualities. Disloyalty, jealousy, revenge, hatred, madness, self-destructiveness, tom foolery, devotion, faith---they were all there in Shakespeare’s plays, delivered in language, carefully calibrated that they remained under artistic control.
The president sometimes paused in a conversation to read or recite a Shakespearean passage. In particular, Shakespeare’s dark passages reflected the agony he experienced during the war. Of all the forms of chaos Lincoln faced, the inner demons that sometimes overtook him were the most painful. Those demons were especially harsh when he witnessed death, both in his family and in the Union military. But in Lincoln’s case, depression was not a crippling factor for long. Melancholy Shakespearean passages provided him with relief. They offered him structure, resonant versions of gloom. They organized sad topics and made them meaningful. Reciting dark passages out loud let him project his depression outward so that it was filtered through the improving lens of poetry. The rhythms and images of verse crystalized his private experience in a manner similar to the way his finest speeches crystallized and uplifted the national experience.
---from "Abe: Abraham Lincoln In His Times" by David S. Reynolds..
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