Lincoln's Writings

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Tag: Literary

Letter to James Hackett (August 17, 1863)

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On June 29, 2013

In Honest Abe

Ranking

#131 on the list of 150 Most Teachable Lincoln Documents

Annotated Transcript

“Some of Shakspeare’s plays I have never read; while others I have gone over perhaps as frequently as any unprofessional reader. Among the latter are Lear, Richard Third, Henry Eighth, Hamlet, and especially Macbeth. I think nothing equals Macbeth. It is wonderful.”

On This Date

HD Daily Report, August 17, 1863

The Lincoln Log, August 17, 1863

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How Historians Interpret

“Lincoln continued reading Shakespeare well after he left New Salem. The Bard of Avon ‘was his constant companion. He took a copy with him almost always when traveling, and read it at leisure moments.’ He especially liked political figures, including Richard III, Hamlet, Macbeth, Julius Caesar, and Coriolanus. His favorite plays were Hamlet and Macbeth. As president, Lincoln recited soliloquies from Hamlet and Richard III and told an actor that he had read and re-read Shakespeare ‘perhaps as frequently as any unprofessional reader.’”

–Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life (2 volumes, originally published by Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008) Unedited Manuscript by Chapter, Lincoln Studies Center, Volume 1, Chapter 3 (PDF), 228-229.

 

“Lincoln also acquired a taste for poetry, especially Burns and Shakespeare; and it is worth remembering in this context that Burns was read in the early nineteenth century as a religious skeptic, while the Shakespeare Lincoln liked best had a strong whiff of fatalism to it. Lincoln’s comment to the actor James Hackett in 1863 that he preferred the king of Denmark’s “soliloquy in Hamlet commencing ‘O, my offence is rank'” to the more celebrated “To be, or not to be,” is usually treated as an embarrassing but amiable example of an amateur’s enthusiasm. Not enough interpreters of Lincoln have taken the trouble to read the soliloquy (act 3, scene 3) and notice that it speaks in agonizing tones about the inability of human beings to choose, on their own, even the most desirable ends:

O, my offense is rank, it smells to heaven …

… what then? what rests?

Try what repentance can: what can it not?

Yet what can it when one can not repent?

O wretched state! O bosom black as death!

O limned soul, that struggling to be free

Art more engaged!”

–Allen C. Guelzo, “Abraham Lincoln and the Doctrine of Necessity,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 18 no. 1 (1997), 57-81.

 

“He spent much of his time, for instance, in reading newspapers—not the comprehensive journals of today, but small sheets filled almost entirely with political matter highly colored by the partisan bias of each editor. He was inordinately fond of such humorists as Artemus Ward and Petroleum V. Nasby, frequently reading passages from their writings to the members of his cabinet. In striking contrast was his passion for Shakespeare. Here again his propensity to dig deeply even if narrowly is illustrated. Though he was familiar enough with Hamlet and Macbeth and a few other plays to challenge the interpretations of the foremost Shakesperian actor of the time, he casually confessed that several of the plays he had not even read.”

–Paul M. Angle, “Lincoln’s Power with Words,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 3, no. 1 (1981): 8-27.

NOTE TO READERS

This page is under construction and will be developed further by students in the new “Understanding Lincoln” online course sponsored by the House Divided Project at Dickinson College and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. To find out more about the course and to see some of our videotaped class sessions, including virtual field trips to Ford’s Theatre and Gettysburg, please visit our Livestream page at http://new.livestream.com/gilderlehrman/lincoln

 

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Executive Mansion,
Washington,
August 17, 1863.
 
My dear Sir:
Months ago I should have acknowledged the receipt of your book, and accompanying kind note; and I now have to beg your pardon for not having done so.
For one of my age, I have seen very little of the drama. The first presentation of Falstaff I ever saw was yours here, last winter or spring. Perhaps the best compliment I can pay is to say, as I truly can, I am very anxious to see it again. Some of Shakspeare’s plays I have never read; while others I have gone over perhaps as frequently as any unprofessional reader. Among the latter are Lear, Richard Third, Henry Eighth, Hamlet, and especially Macbeth. I think nothing equals Macbeth. It is wonderful. Unlike you gentlemen of the profession, I think the soliloquy in Hamlet commencing “O, my offence is rank” surpasses that commencing “To be, or not to be.” But pardon this small attempt at criticism. I should like to hear you pronounce the opening speech of Richard the Third. Will you not soon visit Washington again? If you do, please call and let me make your personal acquaintance. 
Yours truly 
A. LINCOLN.

Letter to James Hackett (November 2, 1863)

By

On June 29, 2013

In Honest Abe

Contributing Editors for this page include Andrew Villwock

Ranking

#132 on the list of 150 Most Teachable Lincoln Documents

Annotated Transcript

“My note to you I certainly did not expect to see in print; yet I have not been much shocked by the newspaper comments upon it. Those comments constitute a fair specimen of what has occurred to me through life. I have endured a great deal of ridicule without much malice; and have received a great deal of kindness, not quite free from ridicule. I am used to it.”

On This Date

HD Daily Report, November 2, 1863

The Lincoln Log, November 2, 1863

Close Readings

Posted at YouTube by “Understanding Lincoln” Andrew Villwock, Fall 2013

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How Historians Interpret

“Of all the clamorous horde, none dismayed Lincoln more than the eminent Shakespearean actor, James H. Hackett. After seeing Hackett play Falstaff, the president wrote him a fan letter. The indiscreet actor allowed it to get into the hands of newspapers, including the New York Herald, which ridiculed Lincoln’s taste in soliloquies. Abashed, Hackett apologized to Lincoln, who replied: ‘Give yourself no uneasiness on the subject. . . . My note to you I certainly did not expect to see in print; yet I have not been much shocked by the newspaper comments upon it. Those comments constitute a fair specimen of what has occurred to me through life. I have endured a great deal of ridicule without much malice; and have received a great deal of kindness, not quite free from ridicule. I am used to it.’ The friendly correspondence between them ended when Hackett asked for a diplomatic post that could not be given. John Hay recalled that a ‘hundred times this experience was repeated: a man would be introduced to the President whose disposition and talk were agreeable; he took pleasure in his conversation for two or three interviews, and then this congenial person would ask some favor impossible to grant, and go away in bitterness of spirit.’”

–Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life (2 volumes, originally published by Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008) Unedited Manuscript by Chapter, Lincoln Studies Center, Volume 2, Chapter 35 (PDF), 3868.

 

“That same year, the celebrated Shakespearean actor James Hackett made public a letter from Lincoln in which the Shakespeare-loving president un-inhibitedly identified his favorites among the Bard’s play and soliloquies. Perhaps aware that Hackett was a longtime friend of his rival Henry Raymond, Bennett pounds on the letter, editorializing: ‘Mr. Lincoln’s genius is wonderfully versatile. No department of human knowledge seems unexplored by him. He is equally at home whether discussing divinity with political preachers, debating plans of campaign with military heroes, [and] illustrating the Pope’s bull against the comet to a pleasure party from Chicago… It only remained for him to cap the climax of popular astonishment and admiration by showing himself to be a dramatic critic of the first order, and the greatest and most profound of the army of Shakespearean commentators.’ When Hackett wrote Lincoln to apologize for inadvertently giving the Herald and opportunity to taunt him, Lincoln assured him that he need not worry. Shrugging off his long years of experience as a target of newspaper mockery, Lincoln sighed: ‘I have endured a great deal of ridicule without much malice; and have received a great deal of kindness, not quite free from ridicule. I am used to it.’”

–Harold Holzer, Lincoln and the Power of the Press: The War for Public Opinion (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014), 482-483.

NOTE TO READERS

This page is under construction and will be developed further by students in the new “Understanding Lincoln” online course sponsored by the House Divided Project at Dickinson College and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. To find out more about the course and to see some of our videotaped class sessions, including virtual field trips to Ford’s Theatre and Gettysburg, please visit our Livestream page at http://new.livestream.com/gilderlehrman/lincoln

 

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Private
Executive Mansion,
Washington, Nov. 2. 1863.
 
James H. Hackett
My dear Sir:
Yours of Oct. 22nd. is received, as also was, in due course, that of Oct. 3rd. I look forward with pleasure to the fulfilment of the promise made in the former.
Give yourself no uneasiness on the subject mentioned in that of the 22nd. My note to you I certainly did not expect to see in print; yet I have not been much shocked by the newspaper comments upon it. Those comments constitute a fair specimen of what has occurred to me through life. I have endured a great deal of ridicule without much malice; and have received a great deal of kindness, not quite free from ridicule. I am used to it. 
Yours truly 
A. LINCOLN

Letter to Andrew Johnston With Poem (April 18, 1846)

By

On June 29, 2013

In The Railsplitter

Contributing Editors for this page include Todd Jansson

Ranking

#134 on the list of 150 Most Teachable Lincoln Documents

Annotated Transcript

On This Date

HD Daily Report, April 18, 1846

The Lincoln Log, April 18, 1846

Close Readings

Todd Jansson, Understanding Lincoln blog post (via Genius), 2016

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How Historians Interpret

“In Indiana Lincoln was home again. Even as he stumped politically, he was thinking poetically. “That part of the country,” he later wrote a friend, “is within itself, as unpoetical as any spot of the earth; but still, seeing and its objects and inhabitants aroused feelings in me which were certainly poetry.”

— John C. Waugh, One Man Was Great Enough: Abraham Lincoln’s Road to the Civil War (Boston: Houghton Miffin Harcourt, 2007).

“He preferred such lugubrious woks as the poem “Mortality” by William Knox. ‘I would give all I am worth, and go into debt, to be able to write so fine a piece as I think that is,’ he said in 1846. Lawrence Weldon observed him, at day’s end on the circuit, sit ‘by the decaying embers of an old-fashioned fire-place’ and ‘quote at length’ from ‘Mortality.’ He told friends that Knox’s verses ‘sounded to him as much like true poetry as anything he had ever heard.’ Evidently he first made its acquaintance in New Salem but came to love it intensely after visiting southwestern Indiana during the 1844 presidential campaign. He described that trip as a visit to “the neighborhood in that State where I was raised, where my mother and only sister were buried, and from which I have been absent about fifteen years.”

—Michael Burlingame, The Inner World of Abraham Lincoln (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 108.

 

NOTE TO READERS

This page is under construction and will be developed further by students in the new “Understanding Lincoln” online course sponsored by the House Divided Project at Dickinson College and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. To find out more about the course and to see some of our videotaped class sessions, including virtual field trips to Ford’s Theatre and Gettysburg, please visit our Livestream page at http://new.livestream.com/gilderlehrman/lincoln

 

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Tremont, April 18, 1846.
 
Friend Johnston: 
Your letter, written some six weeks since, was received in due course, and also the paper with the parody. It is true, as suggested it might be, that I have never seen Poe’s “Raven”; and I very well know that a parody is almost entirely dependent for its interest upon the reader’s acquaintance with the original. Still there is enough in the polecat, self-considered, to afford one several hearty laughs. I think four or five of the last stanzas are decidedly funny, particularly where Jeremiah “scrubbed and washed, and prayed and fasted.”
I have not your letter now before me; but, from memory, I think you ask me who is the author of the piece I sent you, and that you do so ask as to indicate a slight suspicion that I myself am the author. Beyond all question, I am not the author. I would give all I am worth, and go in debt, to be able to write so fine a piece as I think that is. Neither do I know who is the author. I met it in a straggling form in a newspaper last summer, and I remember to have seen it once before, about fifteen years ago, and this is all I know about it. The piece of poetry of my own which I alluded to, I was led to write under the following circumstances. In the fall of 1844, thinking I might aid some to carry the State of Indiana for Mr. Clay, I went into the neighborhood in that State in which I was raised, where my mother and only sister were buried, and from which I had been absent about fifteen years. That part of the country is, within itself, as unpoetical as any spot of the earth; but still, seeing it and its objects and inhabitants aroused feelings in me which were certainly poetry; though whether my expression of those feelings is poetry is quite another question. When I got to writing, the change of subjects divided the thing into four little divisions or cantos, the first only of which I send you now and may send the others hereafter. 
Yours truly,
A. LINCOLN.
 
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.
O Memory! thou midway world
‘Twixt earth and paradise,
Where things decayed and loved ones lost
In dreamy shadows rise,
And, freed from all that’s earthly vile,
Seem hallowed, pure, and bright,
Like scenes in some enchanted isle
All bathed in liquid light.
As dusky mountains please the eye
When twilight chases day;
As bugle-notes that, passing by,
In distance die away;
As leaving some grand waterfall,
We, lingering, list its roar—
So memory will hallow all
We’ve known, but know no more.
Near twenty years have passed away
Since here I bid farewell
To woods and fields, and scenes of play,
And playmates loved so well.
Where many were, but few remain
Of old familiar things;
But seeing them, to mind again
The lost and absent brings.
The friends I left that parting day,
How changed, as time has sped!
Young childhood grown, strong manhood gray,
And half of all are dead.
I hear the loved survivors tell
How nought from death could save,
Till every sound appears a knell,
And every spot a grave.
I range the fields with pensive tread,
And pace the hollow rooms,
And feel (companion of the dead)
I’m living in the tombs.

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