6 Quotes by David S. Reynolds

Melancholy Shakespearean passages provided him with relief. They offered structured, resonant versions of gloom. They organized sad topics and made them meaningful. Reciting dark writings aloud let him project his depression outward so that it was filtered through the improving lens of poetry. The rhythms and images of verse crystallized his private experience in a manner similar to the way his finest speeches crystallized and uplifted the national experience.

The cross-fertilization of different images, he hoped, might help to disperse the various ills he and the nation faced.

Along with sharp criticism, America needed a class of writers that would embrace the country and give it “a national character, an identity” creating “a new moral American continent” without which the physical one was “a carcass, a bloat.

As he himself expressed it, his was the greatest of faiths and the least of faiths – the greatest in his belief in God and everyday miracles, the least in his acceptance of any church’s creeds.

He would once say that he wanted Leaves of Grass to be published as a pocket book, to be carried around everywhere: “That would tend to induce people to take me along with them and read me in the open air: I am nearly always successful with the reader in the open air.

Lincoln found that Shakespeare’s universal appeal lay in his depiction of shared human qualities. Disloyalty, jealousy, revenge, hatred, madness, self-destructiveness, tomfoolery, devotion, faith, depression – they were all there in Shakespeare’s plays, delivered in language so carefully calibrated that they remained under artistic control.