I suspect that most of my friends and acquaintances do not believe that there is a second order of existence apart from this present one in which we are born, work, pay taxes, and die. There may not be. Very likely there isn’t. But I at least wish that there were such an order.

I am a reluctant unbeliever. When I read the Sermon on the Mount, or the parable of the Good Samaritan, I cannot help feeling that this teaching must have a source outside this quotidian order of things.

But my faith —or aspiration toward faith — stumbles over the Immaculate Conception, the Virgin Birth, and the Resurrection. And I don’t need any help from Hume to doubt miracles.

All this means that I am left with two choices: either to stop thinking about ultimate questions, or to adopt a faith in something provisionally, undogmatically, hopefully, doubtfully. Not thinking is easy; the immediate demands of daily life almost require it. But sometimes, in quieter moments, I can’t stop thinking about ultimate questions, and there I am: a provisional, undogmatic, hopeful, and doubtful something or other.

In such mood, I often turn to the writings of Evelyn Underhill (1875 -1941), an Anglican authority on mysticism and prayer. In her best known book Mysticism (1911), she wrote

A direct encounter with absolute truth, then, appears to be impossible for normal non-mystical consciousness. We cannot know the reality, or even prove the existence, of the simplest object: though this is a limitation which few people realize acutely and most would deny. But there persists in the race a type of personality which does realize this limitation: and cannot be content with the sham realities that furnish the universe of normal men. It is necessary, as it seems, to the comfort of persons of this type to form for themselves some image of the Something or Nothing which is at the end of their telegraph lines: some “conception of being,” some “theory of knowledge.” They are tormented by the Unknowable, ache for first principles, demand some background to the shadow show of things.

For better or worse, modern life distracts us from seeking “a direct encounter with absolute truth” and for most people this is a very good thing. The person who has had such an encounter can easily forget that they are still human, that is, a quite shabby disreputable sort of being. Among the side effects of mystical experience is megalomania; Walt Whitman, for one, did not entirely evade it. Our culture, being largely unacquainted with mystical experience, has no tried and assured disciplines to offer the mystic to keep him from distressing (to others as well as to himself) experiences.

One thing I try to remember when reading Evelyn Underhill: she is not, for the most part, writing about the psychology of religion. She is not advocating the cultivation of that self-referential mess called “spirituality”. She is writing about the objective existence of the Other, which is the “background of the shadow show of things.”

So what do I get out of reading Evelyn Underhill? Certainly the pleasure of reading her distinguished prose — but anything more? Perhaps it is simply a desire to keep alive in myself the instinct that knows the world to be derivative, deceptive, and stale. For whenever I start to find it bright, original, and absolute, then I will know that my nature has been subdued to what it works in like the dyer’s hand. And that would be a pity.

My favorite among all the Modern Library Giants that I have acquired over the years is “The Shock of Recognition: The Development of Literature in the United States Recorded by the Men Who Made It”, edited by Edmund Wilson. The title is taken from a line by Herman Melville: For genius, all over the world, stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round.

In my copy, this generous selection of essays by mostly American writers about American writers runs to 1290 pages. It was first published in 1943. It is now out of print; inexpensive copies are available on line.

For anyone interested in American literature, or literature generally, or writing of any sort, or just life, this book is a wide deep bowl of fresh salted peanuts. That it should be available only in inexpensive second hand copies speaks to the degree to which educated Americans are curious about their country’s literary past.

The value of this book is partly one of convenience: it gathers together in one place a number of easily available essays, such as Mark Twain’s “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses” and D. H. Lawrence’s “Studies in Classical American Literature.” It also includes a number of unfamiliar or hard-to-find essays, such as John Jay Chapman’s essay on Emerson, or Henry James’s essay on Hawthorne, or H. G. Wells’s essay on Stephen Crane.

A book such as this is open to the objection that it includes nothing written by women or by members of minority groups. This limitation, while regrettable, does not make the book any less rewarding as far as it goes.

I would find it hard to say which of the essays in this book is my favorite — but not impossible. “My Mark Twain” by William Dean Howells is a masterpiece of celebration, and one of the few things by Howells that departs from his usually equable tone and displays real passion.

As editor of The Atlantic Monthly, Howells was one of the first members of the east coast literary establishment to give Twain recognition, both by printing his writing and by reviewing it favorably. He was one of the first to perceive the seriousness and the genius of this popular platform performer from the uncouth west. Twain became his unshakably loyal lifelong friend.

Howells ended his memoir with a peroration as eloquent as it was just:

Out of a nature rich and fertile beyond any I have known, the material
given him by the Mystery that makes a man and then leaves him to make
himself over, he wrought a character of high nobility upon a foundation
of clear and solid truth. At the last day he will not have to confess
anything, for all his life was the free knowledge of any one who would
ask him of it. The Searcher of hearts will not bring him to shame at
that day, for he did not try to hide any of the things for which he was
often so bitterly sorry. He knew where the Responsibility lay, and he
took a man’s share of it bravely; but not the less fearlessly he left the
rest of the answer to the God who had imagined men.

It is in vain that I try to give a notion of the intensity with which he
pierced to the heart of life, and the breadth of vision with which he
compassed the whole world, and tried for the reason of things, and then
left trying. We had other meetings, insignificantly sad and brief; but
the last time I saw him alive was made memorable to me by the kind, clear
judicial sense with which he explained and justified the labor-unions as
the sole present help of the weak against the strong.

Next I saw him dead, lying in his coffin amid those flowers with which we
garland our despair in that pitiless hour. After the voice of his old
friend Twichell had been lifted in the prayer which it wailed through in
broken-hearted supplication, I looked a moment at the face I knew so
well; and it was patient with the patience I had so often seen in it:
something of puzzle, a great silent dignity, an assent to what must be
from the depths of a nature whose tragical seriousness broke in the
laughter which the unwise took for the whole of him. Emerson,
Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes–I knew them all and all the rest of our
sages, poets, seers, critics, humorists; they were like one another and
like other literary men; but Clemens was sole, incomparable, the Lincoln
of our literature.

Among the things I inherited from my Uncle Bob, apart from an inborn need for an unfailing day long supply of snack food, was a dozen or so paperback copies of the novels of Peter De Vries (1910 – 1993). I have been going through them with gratitude to my uncle, who recommended them to me with missionary zeal.

The novels of Peter De Vries are comedies set in a world that is essentially tragic; most are told from the point of view of a bright young man who is beneath his surroundings socially but superior to it intellectually, like the bright young man who reads to his upper-class girlfriend an essay he has written about Sir Thomas Brown, prompting her to exclaim, “Christ, you’re a smart son of a bitch!”

De Vries’s heroes inevitably find that being a smart son-of-a-bitch profiteth little in this world where the race is not always to the swift, anyway you care to understand that word. Accordingly, the humor that a De Vries hero resorts to as an anodyne inclines to the sardonic. And if you aren’t sure what the words “anodyne” and “sardonic” mean, you will be sure when you finish any De Vries novel.

In the preceding paragraph, I lapsed into Biblical rhetoric, and this was natural because Christian faith, or the loss of it, is a leitmotif in the world of Peter De Vries. If you are of little faith, and regret it, but have realized that you are not going to be able to change that, nor will Anyone with supernatural powers ever care to help you out, you are in a good way to enjoy Peter DeVries.

Religious themes, however, are a backdrop in De Vries novels, with the exception of The Blood of the Lamb, which De Vries wrote shortly after he lost his young daughter to cancer. In this one novel, the tragic burden nearly overwhelms the author’s comic muse — certainly would have, if the hero of the story had not found a way to express his anger against God in a manner drawn from the Keystone Cops.

As a comic novelist, De Vries derived much comfort from the fact that the human race is divided into two sexes. Here too pain and laughter are beautifully mingled. I can’t imagine needing to explain this to any of you.

De Vries was a staff writer at the New Yorker for many years. You can Google him to find out how much he was esteemed by his fellow writers (lots) and by the book buying public (less so). But reading him would be more rewarding.

Lincoln is a popular topic among my readers, so I thought I’d list my favorite books about him.

At the same time, I am eager to hear about your favorite Lincoln books.

My favorites are, in no order:

Abraham Lincoln: His Speeches and Writings, ed. by Roy P. Basler. This anthology contains everything by Lincoln that is of real importance. Basler helpfully explains the context of each selection, and also includes in this volume his essay on “Lincoln’s Development as a Writer.” What I found most surprising about this book is the unfailing seriousness of Lincoln in his writings. The storyteller and humorist are not in evidence here — just a formidably intelligent man who was wholly intent on achieving something distinguished.

Abraham Lincoln: A Life, by Michael Burlingame. The two hefty volumes of this biography, published in 2008, run to almost 2000 pages. The story is familiar, but Burlingame makes it all seem new by providing new detail. He did a prodigious amount of original research. For example, everyone knows that Lincoln grew up poor. What wasn’t made clear to us before is that the Lincolns were the poorest of the poor, scorned by other poor people for their shiftlessness and lack of self respect. Lincoln’s rise in life becomes all the more remarkable. This biography is for me an immense bowl of salted peanuts.

Abraham Lincoln, by Lord Charnwood (Baron Godfrey Rathbone Benson). This biography, which was published in 1917, is in my opinion the best written biography of Lincoln, and in many ways the most profound. Charnwood had a true feeling for America and the Lincoln era that would be remarkable in any foreigner. He knew Henry James and had long talks with him about Lincoln and the Civil War in preparation to write this book. What James told him no doubt accounts for Charnwood’s ability to get so many things right.

Any Lincoln books by James G. Randall. When I read Randall’s books, I find myself arguing with him all the time. I do not think that the Lincoln Douglas debates were about nothing. I do not think that the cause of the Civil War was the ineptitude of the political leaders of that era, North and South. Randall believes these things and supports his beliefs with massive, expertly marshalled scholarship. To argue with him, you need to marshall your own scholarship pretty damn well.

The Lincoln Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Legacy from 1860 to Now, edited by Harold Holzer. This wonderful anthology is full of surprises, such as interesting writings about Lincoln by Bram Stoker and Delmore Schwartz. It also includes indispensable essays, such as the studies of Lincoln the writer by Jacques Barzun and Marianne Moore.

The Cooper Union Address performed by Sam Waterston at Cooper Union. On May 5, 2004, Sam Waterston delivered Lincoln’s Cooper Union Address entire, at the place where Lincoln delivered it in 1860. In this speech, Lincoln defended his belief that the authors of the Constitution intended for Congress to have the power to exclude slavery from the territories and from states formed out of territories. To establish his point, Lincoln marshaled a large amount of historical detail and legal history, buttressed my logical and moral reasoning. The speech is easy to follow, and when you listen to Sam Waterston’s performance of it, you experience how it won for Lincoln the presidential nomination of the Republican Party later that year.

I once spent a summer evening, around fifty years ago, sitting on the porch of a house I was staying in, seeking relief from smothering heat. For company I had a bookish acquaintance — not quite a friend — and we were trying to come up with a short list of the true and indispensable masterpieces of American literature. We felt fully qualified for this task; we were young. I forget what we thought we could do with the list.

We made the obvious choices — Huckleberry Finn, Moby Dick, Leaves of Grass, and plenty of Emily Dickinson — and then stopped to think whether we had missed anything that could compare with these works. We thought and thought — and thought. Finally I said, “What about Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address?”

My acquaintance was surprised by this suggestion. He didn’t know much about Lincoln and had never read the address. But he wanted to know why I had thought of it — a speech, of all things. I went into the house and got a book that I knew included the text of the address. Back on the porch, I read it out loud, slowly and carefully. Here is the full text — I recommended that you read it out loud yourself:

Fellow-Countrymen:

At this second appearing to take the oath of the Presidential office there is less occasion for an extended address than there was at the first. Then a statement somewhat in detail of a course to be pursued seemed fitting and proper. Now, at the expiration of four years, during which public declarations have been constantly called forth on every point and phase of this great conflict which is of primary concern to the nation as a whole, little that is new could be presented. The progress of our arms, upon which all else chiefly depends, is as well known to the public as to myself, and it is, I trust, reasonably satisfactory and encouraging to all. With high hope for the future, no prediction in regard to it is ventured.

On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it, all sought to avert it. While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place, devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, insurgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war—seeking to dissolve the Union and divide effects by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came.

One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it. Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. "Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh." If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achievel and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations

When I finished reading it, we were both stunned. We felt that we had just heard, not a speech, but a great musical composition, with the four paragraphs representing different movements. The first two movements were slow, deliberate, and measured; the third movement, by far the longest, was marked by slowly increasing emotional intensity; the fourth movement was a grave and majestic resolution of the whole.

This was our impression. As I said, we were young, and we had been trying to cool ourselves down with Budweisers all evening. But even today, I find that The Second Inaugural Address, of all Lincoln’s writings, is uniquely suggestive of music.

But it is music made of words and their meanings, and of the context in which those words were spoken. The speech becomes even more remarkable the more you look into the meaning and context of its words.

Lincoln was inaugurated for a second term as President on March 4, 1865. The armies of the Confederacy had by then been worn down by battle, disease, and desertion until they were incapable of fighting any longer. Lee would not surrender the principal Confederate army for another five weeks, but the outcome of the war was not in doubt. In the meanwhile, tens of thousands of sick and wounded soldiers, both Northern and Southern, were suffering private hells in makeshift military hospitals scattered across the thousand mile wide theatre of war.

A photograph exists of Lincoln delivering his Second Inaugural Address. In this photograph, his head is bent forward slightly as he reads the address from papers in his hands. His unusual height is apparent; he truly was a physical anomaly. In front of him is a stand on which someone had placed a glass of water. (The stand was for some years in the possession of the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston. I went to see it one day — to be in the presence of an object that had stood in the presence of Lincoln as he delivered his address, and that had held the glass of water from which he drank. When I got to the Society, I found out that the stand had been sent to the national archives in Washington a few days before.)

The crowd at Lincoln’s second inauguration was much larger than the crowd at his first. It is safe to say that people had come to hear a victory speech. Lincoln could have been pardoned for giving one. Under his leadership, the North had achieved what few had thought possible four years earlier. The Union was saved, democracy was vindicated, and slavery was soon to be abolished. As Bismarck and leaders of other nations realized, with the victory of the North a world power of the first rank had been created. Lincoln had accomplished something greater even than Washington had accomplished.

But only the people standing within a few yards of Lincoln were able to hear his words, which were as remarkable as his achievements. “Fellow countrymen”, he began, addressing the people both of the North and of the South. He continued, in a dry matter of fact tone, to recapitulate how the war had started, noting that the South had started it — as close as he was to come to criticizing the South in the entire address: “Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came.”

The third paragraph of the speech is by far the longest. I do not feel that I am engaging in hyperbole when I say that it is a masterpiece of thought and expression.

First the thought. Lincoln meditates on the crime of slavery and the will of God, Who, Lincoln says, held both North and South accountable for that crime, giving to both the war as its punishment. An astonishing conclusion to have been reached by the leader of the victorious armies! Lincoln is said to have disliked “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”, which he regarded as self-righteous; he preferred the unpretentious song “Dixie”, which he said the North could claim as booty of war.

[Lincoln’s refusal to enlist God under the Union banner makes him somehow similar in conviction to Karl Barth (1886 – 1968) who is widely regarded as the greatest protestant theologian since Calvin. Barth insisted that God is not immanent in the human mind or human heart but is “above him—unapproachably distant and unutterably strange,” “unknown,” “Wholly Other” (Rom. II, 27, 56, 49).  Barth became interested in the American Civil War after someone gave him books about it as a present; he even asked to be taken on a tour of the Gettysburg battlefield during one of his few visits to the United States. I can imagine that he would find much to approve in the Second Inaugural Address, but I have been unable to find that he ever had anything to say about Lincoln or his ideas about God.]

Next, the expression. The language of this paragraph resounds with the cadences of the Authorized or King James Version of the Bible — so much so that Lincoln could easily and naturally incorporate Matthew 18:7–14 (“Woe unto the world . . .”) and Psalm 19:9 (“The judgements of the Lord l . . “) from that version into his own words. Lincoln’s mastery of the spoken word is nowhere better exemplified than in this paragraph, with its slowly increasing emotional intensity, reaching a crescendo with the quotation of Psalm 19:9.

The final paragraph makes no distinction between North and South in calling upon Americans to work together to restore the Union. Lincoln had for some time been looking forward to the problems of reconstruction. He knew how damaged and exhausted the country was, how little remained of its stores of generosity and idealism. But there was the work of healing to be done.

One of the first people to comment on address was Frederick Douglass, who told Lincoln at a White House reception after the inauguration that it was a “sacred effort”. Thurlow Weed, the Republican party boss of New York, wrote Lincoln a letter praising the speech. Lincoln’s reply is well known:

Thurlow Weed, Esq

My dear Sir.

Every one likes a compliment. Thank you for yours on my little notification speech, and on the recent Inaugeral [sic] Address. I expect the latter to wear as well as — perhaps better than — anything I have produced; but I believe it is not immediately popular. Men are not flattered by being shown that there has been a difference of purpose between the Almighty and them. To deny it, however, in this case, is to deny that there is a God governing the world. It is a truth which I thought needed to be told; and as whatever of humiliation there is in it, falls most directly on myself, I thought others might afford for me to tell it.

Yours truly

A. LINCOLN

The Second Inaugural Address prompted Walter Bagehot, the brilliant editor of the London Economist, to write a generous palinode in an editoral published on the occasion of Lincoln’s death. For the previous four years, Bagehot had been writing articles about American affairs, and in all that time had found nothing better to say about Lincoln than that he was “well-meaning” and “honest”. Now he wrote:

We do not know  in history such an example of the growth of a ruler in wisdom as was exhibited by Mr. Lincoln. Power and responsibility visibly widened his mind and elevated his character. . . .The very style of his public papers altered, till the very man who had written in an official dispatch about “Uncle Sam’s web feet” drew up his final inaugural in a style which extorted from critics so hostile as those of the Saturday  Reviewers a burst of involuntary admiration. . . 

In 1963, the American theologian and political activist Reinhold Niebuhr wrote, with reference especially to the Second Inaugural Address, that

the religion of Abraham Lincoln in the context of the traditional religion of his time and place … must lead to the conclusion that Lincoln’s religious convictions were superior in depth and purity to those, not only of the political leaders of his day, but of the religious leaders of the era.

What do I make of all this?

The democracy to which Lincoln devoted his life would now seem to have fallen on very hard times, so hard that a recovery seems almost impossible. The appearance of Lincoln in our history — improbable in the extreme as it was— can provide us with comfort, the comfort of knowing that we may not appreciate, in our moments of dejection, just how rich in possibility is the realm of the actual. But much is demanded of us. In the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln urged us to be devoted to “the task remaining before us”, the task of winning the war for democracy . In his Second Inaugural Address, he urged us to “bind the nation’s wounds”, that is, the wounds of a nation that was divided and horribly damaged. When asked to take up such tasks, we very naturally hesitate, in view of their difficulty. But, on the other hand, can we really consider refusing? It is Abraham Lincoln who is asking . . .

Several of my most devoted — and, need I say it, most discerning — readers have told me that they like to read about Lincoln in this space. I am loathe to disappoint them. And it happens that I like to write about Lincoln. So I will now revisit the subject, which, I am happy to find, is inexhaustible.

In this post, I will look at a public letter that Lincoln wrote to Horace Greeley, the founder and editor of the New York Tribune, on August 22, 1862. Greeley was a leader of the faction of the Republican party that wanted Lincoln to take immediate action against slavery. Lincoln wrote to reassure Greeley that he had not forgotten about slavery, the cause of the war; while doing this, he had to be careful not to alarm the faction of the party that insisted that the war was fought to preserve the Union and with no other aim. Lincoln wrote at a time when the war was not going well for the North and enlistments were not supplying the needs of the Union army. While failing to pacify the passionate and irascible Greeley altogether, Lincoln’s letter was widely admired for its vigorously reasoned exposition of his policies, and for its kindness and tact in dealing with Greeley.

Lincoln’s letter was in response to an editorial that Greeley had written and published in the Tribune on August 20. Titled “The Prayer of Twenty Million”, it criticized Lincoln for not enforcing the Confiscation Acts passed by Congress and signed by Lincoln in 1861 and 1862. These acts required Union forces to confiscate confederate property, including slaves, whenever possible. Lincoln‘s enforcement of these laws was deliberately lax; he was not yet ready to make such a direct attack on slavery..

One hundred years later, Robert Penn Warren would write that the Civil War happened because the South over-estimated how much the North cared about blacks and under-estimated how much it cared about the Union. Lincoln made no such miscalculation. He knew that northern soldiers believed themselves to be fighting to preserve the Union, not to emancipate the slaves. He knew that the border states — Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware — might join the South if the war became a war of emancipation. And he feared that resistance to a draft, which he expected in any case, would be far greater if he were drafting men to liberate slaves.

The mood of Lincoln’s critics is exemplified by this letter that Horace Greeley sent to Senator Charles Sumner on August 7, 1862:

My dear sir:

Do you remember that old theological book containing containing this

”Chapter I. Hell.

Chapter II. Hell Continued.”

Well that gives a hint of the way Old Abe ought to be talked to in this crisis in the nation’s destiny.

The drift and tenor of Greeley’s “Prayer of 20 Millions” can be inferred from these excerpts:

• We think you are strangely and disastrously remiss in the discharge of your official and imperative duty with regard to the emancipating provisions of the new Confiscation Act.
• We think you are unduly influenced by the counsels, the representations, the menaces, of certain fossil politicians hailing from the Border Slave States.
• We think timid counsels in such a crisis calculated to prove perilous, and probably disastrous.
• We complain that the Union cause has suffered, and is now suffering immensely, from mistaken deference to Rebel Slavery. 
• We complain that the Confiscation Act which you approved is habitually disregarded by your Generals, and that no word of rebuke for them from you has yet reached the public ear. . . I entreat you to render a hearty and unequivocal obedience to the law of the land.

Here is Lincoln’s public letter to Greeley:

Yours,
A. Lincoln!

This letter is extraordinary in several respects.

It is extraordinary in having been written at all. “So novel a thing as a newspaper correspondence between the President and an editor excites great attention,” wrote one journalist. No all of the attention was favorable. Many people, including some of Lincoln’s supporters, felt that for Lincoln to respond to criticisms printed in a newspaper would diminish the dignity and effectiveness of the office of president.

It is extraordinary in the boldness with which it refuses to answer Greeley’s criticisms point by point. Not wishing to antagonize so influential a supporter, or to impair the dignity of the presidency by arguing with a newspaper editor, he disposes of Greeley’s erroneous statements and false inferences by an adroit use of the rhetorical device praeteritio, in which the speaker or writer calls attention to a fact by announcing that he is going to ignore it. (“If there be in it any statements, or assumptions of fact, which I may know to be erroneous, I do not, now and here, controvert them.”)

It is extraordinary for the magnanimity of its treatment of Greeley. Lincoln writes: “If there be perceptable in it an impatient and dictatorial tone, I waive it in deference to an old friend, whose heart I have always supposed to be right.” The magnanimity of Lincoln’s “deference” to Greeley as an old friend strikes me as genuine.

[Lincoln was hardly the only person to be handled roughly by Greeley. Once Mark Twain mistakenly entered Greeley’s office while looking for someone else in the same building. Greeley, looking up from his work, said to Twain, “Whoever you are, get the hell out of here!”. Twain said, “I’m just looking for a gentle_” “We don’t have any of those in stock here!” Greeley interjected. This was Mark Twain’s sole meeting with Greeley.]

Lincoln believed — this is my guess — that there was something wrong with Greeley, as does a modern biographer, who thinks that he had Asperger’s Syndrome. And Lincoln liked to make allowances for people whose personal problems or defects forced them to engage with the world at an oblique angle. He had chosen as his law partner the eccentric, hard drinking, politically radical William Herndon; their partnership lasted for 16 years. He had special affection for his son Tad, whose pronounced lisp caused him social problems and emotional turmoil. He invited a fellow Springfield lawyer, the large and loutish Ward Hill Lamon, to accompany him to Washington as a bodyguard and factotum; the detective Allen Pinkerton, who foiled at least one assassination attempt on Lincoln, said that Lamon was “an idiot.” (Lamon was out of town on official business the night of Lincoln’s assassination.) So I find it easy to suppose that Lincoln’s deference to Greeley was based on a sort of affection — only note that it is Greeley’s heart, not his mind, that Lincoln supposes to to be right.

Lincoln also no doubt respected Greeley for his strengths and accomplishments. Like Lincoln, he had made his way upward in the world through hard work and ability. His family lost everything in the panic of 1837, and he was forced at age 15 to leave school and apprentice himself to a printer in Vermont. Here he learned the technical and business side of the newspaper business. He then moved to New York City, which at that time supported dozens of daily papers. For several years he took small writing and editing jobs for various papers, and then founded The New-Yorker, a weekly which, like its unhyphenated twentieth century namesake, reported literary and artistic news for a sophisticated audience. When Greeley’s New-Yorker failed (James Thurber would not be born until 1894), he founded a newspaper that he named The Tribune, and saw to it that that it was well-edited and written. (Among his talented writers and editors was Margaret Fuller, through whom he became acquainted with a remarkable young writer in Concord, Massachusetts named Henry David Thoreau; Greeley would tirelessly promote Thoreau’s writing for the rest of his short life.) The Tribune quickly achieved the largest circulation of any newspaper in the country, largely through mail subscriptions, which made it a truly national newspaper.

Greeley’s political history was like Lincoln’s as well. He became an energetic supporter of the Whig Party (like Lincoln), and when the Whig Party was destroyed by sectional tensions, he migrated to the Republican Party (like Lincoln). He was unlike Lincoln, however, in his uncompromising advocacy of the abolition of slavery, of women’s rights (including the right to vote) , of the rights of indigenous people, and various other reforms. He became a political ally of prominent New York Republicans such as William Seward and the powerful party boss Thurlow Weed.

Lincoln, then, had reasons to pay Greeley deference, but the rest of his letter does not address Greeley’s criticisms at all. In fact, Lincoln had written a draft of it before Greeley published his editorial.

Finally, this letter is extraordinary for its extreme lucidity. In writing the letter, Lincoln had evidently taken extraordinary pains to make his meaning unmistakable. He systematically anticipates every possible misinterpretation of his motives and counters each one with his actual position. It is as good an example as any of the impassioned reasoning that is the basis of his eloquence. Given the important purposes that this letter was to serve, it was natural that Lincoln should wish it to be understood correctly.

The speech by Lincoln that most resembles this letter in its painstaking striving after unmistakable meaning was the Cooper Union Address, delivered in New York City on February 27, 1860. In that speech, Lincoln presented a tightly reasoned argument that the United States Constitution gave the Congress the power to regulate slavery in the territories — and even to exclude it. The speech made Lincoln a leading contender for the Republican nomination. Please see Sam Watterston’s remarkable recreation of that address:

https://www.c-span.org/video/?181864-1/abraham-lincolns-cooper-union-address

But in fact, Lincoln had been working at the art of making his meanings unmistakable since his youth. When he was a child he liked to listen to conversations between adults, but he became frustrated and angry whenever he could not understand what the adults were talking about. This experience accounts, some think, for what became in him a passionate concern for clarity of expression. Just as he hated to be baffled, he hated to baffle others.

What was the political value to Lincoln of this letter?

In answering Greeley’s letter, Lincoln was able to address not only the public, which needed assurance that Lincoln had a plan. It also addressed the vehemently anti-slavery wing of the Republican Party, which had been growing restive as months passed without progress being made to destroy slavery. In the letter, Lincoln stated several times, that he would attack slavery directly if he thought that this would further the primary aim of the war, the restoration of the Union. What he did not reveal is that he had already written a draft of a “preliminary emancipation proclamation.”. He had decided not to release the proclamation, however, until a Union army had won a significant victory over the south; otherwise, releasing the proclamation might appear to be an act of desperation.

He did not have to wait much longer. On September 17, 1862, the main Union army, led by general George McClellan, fought Lee’s army at a place known as Antietam, near Sharpsburg, Maryland. Each army suffered such extreme casualties that talk of a victory seemed absurd. Lee was, however, forced to withdraw his army from Maryland.

Several days after the battle, when the nation was still trying to comprehend the scope of the horror at Antietam, Lincoln called a meeting of his cabinet. As he often did, he began the meeting by reading out loud the latest newspaper column by Artemus Ward, his favorite humorist:

IN the fall of 1856 I showed my show in Utiky, a trooly grate sitty in the State of New York.

The people gave me a cordyal recepshun. The press was loud in her prases.

1 day as I was givin a descripshun of my Beests and Snaiks in my usual flowry stile, what was my skorn & disgust to see a big burly feller walk up to the cage containin my wax figgers of the Lord’s Last Supper, and cease Judas Iscariot by the feet and drag him out on the ground. He then commenced fur to pound him as hard as he cood.

“What under the son are you abowt?” cried I.

Sez he, “What did you bring this pussylanermus cuss here fur?” & he hit the wax figger another tremenjus blow on the hed.

Sez I, “You egrejus ass that air’s a wax figger—a representashun of the false ’Postle.”

Sez he, “That’s all very well fur you to say, but I tell you, old man, that Judas Iscariot can’t show hisself in Utiky with impunerty by a darn site!” with which observashun he kaved in Judassis hed. The young man belonged to 1 of the first famerlies in Utiky. I sood him and the Joory brawt in a verdick of Arson in the 3d degree.

The members of Lincoln’s cabinet enjoyed the story although Stanton thought that such a frivolous diversion was not appropriate given the somber circumstances. Then Lincoln brought out his draft of a preliminary Emancipation Proclamation and read it to the cabinet. He had decided to make this proclamation public on September 22, he said. Antietam, terrible as it was, was a victory.

Although the Emancipation Proclsmation is far from his most eloquent composition — in fact, he appears to have made it prosaic deliberately — one paragraph is as stirring as anything he ever wrote:

That on the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free . . .

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As every school child used to know, Lincoln’s three minute speech at the dedication of the Union cemetery at Gettysburg, on November 19, 1863, was better than the two hour speech delivered by Edward Everett on the same occasion. The irony of the situation was easily grasped: Lincoln’s few words said more than Everett’s prolixity, and said it better.

Note: In case you haven’t read it in a while, here’s the best of the several versions of Lincoln’s remarks:

Everett himself was one of the first to be aware of the irony. On the day after the dedication, he wrote the following in a letter to Lincoln:

Permit me . . . to express my great admiration of the thoughts expressed by you, with such eloquent sensibility & appropriateness, at the consecration of the Cemetery. I should be glad, if I could flatter myself, that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion in two hours, as you did in two minutes. My son, who parted from me at Baltimore & my daughter concur in this sentiment.

Lincoln replied graciously:

Your kind note of to-day is received. In our respective parts yesterday, you could not have been excused $to make a short address, nor I a long one. I am pleased to know that, in your judgment, the little I did say was not entirely a failure. 

Lincoln’s reply refers to the fact that Everett had been invited by the organizers of the ceremony to be the principal speaker and in that role was expected to speak at some length. Lincoln, however, had been asked only to deliver “a few brief remarks”, simply to provide official sanction for the new cemetery.

A second irony becomes evident upon closer inspection of the context of the two speeches. The irony involves the degree of risk that each speaker was willing to take in shaping his remarks.

In giving the kind of speech that he gave, Everett was taking little risk with his reputation as the nation’s leading orator. His speech was exactly what his audience wanted and expected: long and replete with references to ancient Greek and Roman history as well as with patriotic exhortation to see the war through to victory. It also included a detailed and accurate review of what had happened when Meade’s army fought Lee’s over this ground on July 1, 2, and 3 earlier that year — the sort of information that was hard to come by back then, in the darkness of our nation’s pre-electronic era.

But Lincoln, who had immensely more at stake than the maintenance of his reputation as an orator, chose not to play it safe in shaping his speech. He had been invited to make “a few brief remarks”. It is not known exactly what the organizing committee meant by “brief”. We know what Lincoln meant by it. The speech that he gave was radical in its brevity. At 275 words, Lincoln’s remarks were a tiny fraction in length of Everett’s oration of 13, 607 words. Such a speech risked being dismissed as hardly any speech at all by an audience that was accustomed to long speeches. It risked creating the impression that Lincoln couldn’t think of anything to say. And the brevity of the speech would require Lincoln to neglect the orator’s rule that, to make sure that you get a point across with your audience, you must say it at least three times. Lincoln was limiting himself to saying things of the greatest importance only once.

The thing of greatest importance that Lincoln had to keep in mind was his own chance of being re-elected to the presidency the following year. This was a matter of more than personal ambition. On Lincoln’s re-election depended the survival of the Union, for his chief political rival, General George McClellan, had pledged that if elected he would seek to end the war by negotiation — in other words, by allowing the Union to be divided into a slave half and a free half. And the Union’s survival was essential to demonstrate to the world that democracy was a viable form of government.

To improve his chance of being re-elected, Lincoln had clearly to state his administration’s war aims, to make clear why those war aims were worth the suffering that the war was inflicting on the nation, and to rally the nation behind those war aims. All this in 275 words.

Everett, then, played it safe having comparatively little at stake. Lincoln, having everything at stake, risked all on extreme brevity. A second kind of irony.

At this point in my reflections on the Gettysburg Address, it occurred to me that the significance of Lincoln’s speech might best be apprehended through other ironies. I sensed that there were more, went hunting for them, and found some.

I found irony in the contrasting educational backgrounds of Everett and Lincoln, and the degree to which each man’s background contributed to his grasp of the significances of the tragic events that had engrossed both men’s lives.

A broader, more cosmopolitan background than Everett’s is hard to imagine. He was the first American to be awarded a PhD degree, which he earned at Göttingen, one of Europe‘s most distinguished Universities. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm taught there while preparing their great collection of fairy tales; Otto von Bismarck would later study law there; and Bernhardt Riemann while at the university would propose the extensions to classical geometry that would form the basis of Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Everett’s education could also be said to include impressive life experience, such as meeting Goethe and Byron, teaching ancient Greek literature at Harvard, serving as president of Harvard, representing Massachusetts in the U. S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate, serving as Governor of Massachusetts, and being the United States Ambassador to the Court of Saint James.

Lincoln had had only a few months of formal education, and his life experience, before he was elected president, would in itself have made him known to history as nothing more than a provincial celebrity. He had run a general store that failed, had been a moderately successful politician, and had made a comfortable middle class living as a lawyer, known for his way with juries. His educational opportunities have often been underplayed by biographers, to exaggerate the improbability of his amounting to anything. He did have access to books and read widely, mostly in classics of English literature. Michael Burlingame, Lincoln’s most recent biographer, discovered that Lincoln liked Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man, and it seems likely that this poem was an influence on Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address.

Still, he lacked what are called “advantages,” the principal advantage being a mentor to take his education in hand. Lacking a mentor, he ran the risks run by all autodidacts, such as becoming over-confident, or developing a pompous, eccentric style of self expression. His great contemporary Walt Whitman, another autodidact, did not altogether escape these risks. But Lincoln did, through his remarkable power of standing apart from himself, and judging himself and his works with a terrible objectivity.

One advantage that he appears to have had was genetic; although almost nothing is known of his mother Nancy Hanks, friends and neighbors described her as “intellectual” and “brilliant.”. But it is impossible to estimate the importance of this advantage to Lincoln’s development.

And yet it was Lincoln, the man without educational advantages, and not Everett, who displayed the more comprehensive grasp of the significance of the battle of Gettysburg. Lincoln saw and stated more clearly than Everett, that in a world dominated by regimes hostile to democracy, it was up to America to demonstrate that a nation could flourish under democratic government. A third irony.

A fourth irony inclines to the technical side. Everett was a classical scholar; Lincoln had “small Latin and less Greek.”. But, as Gary Wills notes in his book Lincoln at Gettysburg, Everett’s own written style owed more to English romantic prose writers than to any Greek writer, while Lincoln’s style resembles that of the ancient Greeks orators and historians on several points.

For example, the thinking of the ancient Greek orators and historians tended to resolve itself into antitheses, expressed in paired clauses. The clauses were marked by short words known as particles, the particle men (μεν) being used in the first clause and the particle de (δε) used in the second clause. The particles are no more translatable than the “eh?” at the end of a Canadian sentence, but they had a specific and well-understood function — like “eh?”, which asks the auditor for confirmation of what the sentence says.

The particle men raises the expectation that the clause in which it occurs will be followed by a second clause that completes or provides a contrast to the first clause. The second clause is marked by de. Lincoln thought naturally in μεν … δε contrasts:

“The world μεν will little note nor long remember what we say here,

“but δε it can never forget what they did here.”

This sentence exactly illustrates the principle stated by the English classical scholar J. D. Denniston in his authoritative study The Greek Particles:

Often . . . the antithesis carries an idea of strong contrast, so that in English we should make one of the clauses concessively dependent on the other. In such cases the weight is far more frequently on the δε clause. Denniston p. 370

(An unmarried daughter of one of Professor Denniston’s colleagues was once urged by her mother to try to get to know Denniston, who wasn’t married either. “He’s a very good man. He knows more about men and de than anyone else,” said the mother. “Well, I know something about men,” sniffed the daughter. Among classicists, that’s a real knee-slapper.)

Lincoln was also a natural master of a more complex device used by ancient Greek orators and historians: the tricolon abundans. This device consists of three clauses (tri-cola) constructed in parallel, with the first two of roughly equal weight or duration, and third of noticeably greater weight or duration (abundans). Conspicuous among ancient Greek writers using this device was Gorgias (438 – 375 B. C), a sophist and teacher of rhetoric. In his charming and erudite book Golden Latin Artistry, the British classicist L. P . Wilkinson refers to Lincoln as particularly “Gorgianic”, citing as an example the phrases

we cannot dedicate,

we cannot consecrate,

we cannot hallow this ground.

which form a textbook example of tricolon abundans. Lincoln made this device even more effective by using two more devices known to classical rhetoricians: anaphora, the repetition or a word or words at the beginning of a phrase (“we cannot”); and asyndeton, the omission of a connective word (in this example, “and”), to indicate vehemence.

Lincoln, of course, had never read Gorgias. (Very little of the writing of Gorgias survives, anyway). He undoubtedly learned about tricolon abundans from the King James Bible and John Bunyan, with which he was thoroughly familiar. The English Bible itself was stylistically influenced by the Latin liturgy, where tricolon abundans is used frequently; for example:

Te Deum laudamus,

Te Deum confitemur,

Te aeternum Patrem omnis terra veneratur;

In the King James Bible, Lincoln undoubtedly read the follow tricola:

Except I shall

see in his hands the print of the nails, and

put my finger into the print of the nails, and

thrust my hand into his side,

I will not believe.

And in The Pilgrim’sProgress, Lincoln read how Christian’s relatives, having discovered that he is troubled by thoughts of damnation, tried to bring him back to his right mind:

sometimes they would deride,

sometimes they would chide,

and sometimes they would quite neglect him:

Rhetorical devices by themselves do not make one a great orator or writer. Anyone can write a tricolon abundans: here’s one that I wrote for this occasion:

I don’t want to clean up my study,
I don’t want to do my laundry,
I don’t want to do these things but I will sometime soon.

What is hard is to use these rhetorical devices without making them seem adventitious. To be effective, they must seem to be the inevitable and necessary vehicles of the thought that they express. This Lincoln was able to do, because he was a skilled artist in words.

This reflection led me to the fifth irony suggested by the speakers at the Gettysburg dedication ceremonies. Everett, with all his training and exposure to the best models of prose, did not become an artist in that medium. Lincoln did.

As a classicist, Everett was familiar with what German scholars call Kunstprosa, or “art prose”, as exemplified in the extreme urbanity of Plato and the almost superhuman eloquence of Demosthenes. At Harvard, he would have taken his students — including Ralph Waldo Emerson — through these masterpieces clause by clause in search of the secrets of their magic. He did not learn to make use of what he found there in his own writing, however.

Lincoln did learn to make use of what he found in the classics — the English classics. In his essay “Lincoln the Literary Genius”, Jacques Barzun wrote of Lincoln as a “literary artist, the maker of a style that is unique in English prose and doubly astonishing in the history of American literature, for nothing led up to it.”

I’m not sure I agree with Barzun that “nothing led up to” Lincoln’s style, at least in the American practice of public speaking. Lincoln admired the speeches of Daniel Webster, and the little I’ve read of Webster suggests that he was an influence on Lincoln’s way of writing. Like Lincoln, Webster was a pleader before juries and a solid reasoner. And Lincoln undoubtedly admired Webster’s famous tricolon, “Liberty and union, one and inseparable, now and forever.”

There was in Lincoln’s prose a unique kind of music, the nature and source of which are elusive. In his book on the Declaration of Independence, Carl L Becker — himself a distinguished writer — tries to define why Jefferson’s prose, for all its felicity, fails to move us the way Lincoln’s does. Edmund Wilson, in his study of the literature of the Civil War, Patriotic Gore, wrote that the prose of Ulysses Grant, rightly admired for its strength and lucidity, lacks music — Lincoln’s music.

One source of Lincoln’s music may have been identified by the poet Marianne Moore, in her 1959 essay “Abraham Lincoln and the Art of the Word” — still the best thing ever written about Lincoln’s prose, in my opinion. Moore lays great emphasis on Lincoln’s study of Euclidean geometry, and how, when Lincoln was most deeply moved by what he was writing about, his writing became more austere, and rational, and Euclidean. Moore calls the writing that results “a Euclid of the heart”.

The best example of what Moore calls Lincoln’s “restrained impetuosity” may be found, in my opinion, in Lincoln’s farewell address to the citizens of Springfield — a short speech that in its artistic perfection deserves to be set beside the short speech that he would make at Gettysburg three years later:

My friends, no one, not in my situation, can appreciate my feeling of sadness at this parting. To this place, and the kindness of these people, I owe everything. Here I have lived a quarter of a century, and have passed from a young to an old man. Here my children have been born, and one is buried. I now leave, not knowing when, or whether ever, I may return, with a task before me greater than that which rested upon Washington. Without the assistance of the Divine Being who ever attended him, I cannot succeed. With that assistance I cannot fail. Trusting in Him who can go with me, and remain with you, and be everywhere for good, let us confidently hope that all will yet be well. To His care commending you, as I hope in your prayers you will commend me, I bid you an affectionate farewell.

Note: This post introduces a feature called Spotlight on Neglected Worth that will appear from time to time on this site. Most articles posted under this rubric will be shorter than the other posts.

I used to believe that Time, the only literary critic whose opinion really matters, would take care to preserve the works of all worthy writers and ensure that they remain known to posterity. Lately, I’ve been seeing evidence that Time performs this important function less diligently than I had imagined. Take the case of Conyers Middleton (1683 — 1759).

Even if you know your way around in the age of Alexander Pope (1688 — 1744), chances are you haven’t heard of Middleton. I discovered him in a footnote in an edition of Pope’s Dunciad (a rollicking work in which Pope fries his enemies in the crackling hot oil of his wit). The footnote says that Pope regarded Middleton as the only person in England who wrote prose as distinguished as his own. (Pope later quarreled with Middleton and never had a nice thing to say about him after that.). As distinguished as his own? That is high praise indeed. Pope’s introduction to his own translation of the Iliad, for example, is one of the greatest essays in the English language, combining critical insight with urbanity of manner and forcefulness of expression. That is my opinion — and Pope’s.

Conyers Middleton was a clergyman from Yorkshire who would have been entirely devoured by oblivion were it not for Pope’s praises, noted above, and for his authorship of a biography of Marcus Tullius Cicero ( 106 — 43 B.C.), the ancient Roman orator and statesman. The biography of Cicero was a well deserved success, in spite of the accusation that it incorporates a great deal of material from the work of another writer. The accusation is true, but Middleton rewrote whatever he stole in his own exemplary style. I’m not sure, then, where that leaves the accusation of plagiarism. Middleton would have done well, at least, to acknowledge the other writer’s contribution to his own work, but he did not.

Middleton begins his biography of Cicero with the following statement of purpose:

TH ERE is no part of history, which seems capable of yielding either more instruction or entertainment than that which offers to us the select lives of great and, virtuous men, who have made an eminent figure on the public stage of the world. In these we see at one view, what the annals of a whole age can afford, that is worthy of notice, and in the wide field of universal history, slipping as it were over the barren places, gather all its flowers, and possess ourselves at once of every thing that is good in it.

Middleton here restates, in his elegant manner, the ancient commonplace that history is valuable chiefly as the record of the deeds of great men, whose virtues are to be studied and emulated. This school of history has had a few modern practitioners, such as John F. Kennedy in his charming study Profiles in Courage. There have been fewer modern historians to share Middleton’s admiration of Cicero himself.

In the following passage, Middleton describes his debt as an historian and biographer to the very man about whom he is writing:

In the execution of this design, I have pursued as closely as I could that very plan which Cicero himself had sketched out for the model of a complete history. WHere he lays it down as a fundamental law, that the writer should not dare to affirm what was falsse, or to suppress what was true ; nor give any suspicion either of favour or disaffection : that in the relation of facts he should observe the order of time, and sometimes add the description of places ; should first explain the counsels, then the acts, and lastly the events of things : that in the counsels he should interpose his own judgment on the merit of them; in the acts relate not only what was done, hut how it was done ; in the events show what share chance or rashness or prudence had in them; that he should describe likewise the particular characters of all the great persons who bare any considerable part in the story; and should dress up the whole in a clear and equable style, without affecting any ornament or seeking any other praise but of perspicuity.

This paragraph encompasses a great deal of matter without confusion or obscurity; the individual points are made separately and distinctly; there is an easy flow from point to point; and the rhythm of the whole is pleasing.

It is unlikely that there will ever again be an audience for what Conyers Middleton has to offer — the rhetoric of the British educated classes in the eighteenth century, freed of its laboriousness and pomposity. But once there was such an audience, to Britain’s great credit.

You probably won’t seek to deepen your acquaintance with Conyers Middleton, unless you are interested in Cicero or eighteenth century English literature, and that’s OK. You have joined me in bearing witness to Conyer Middleton’s limited, specialized, and very real excellence.

I am grateful for the responses of you my readers. Knowing that someone is out there reading my stuff and finding it comprehensible is a thrill.

But, I have two requests to make of you:

1. Try to talk a friend or acquaintance into subscribing to “Yes, Books Matter.”. Emphasize that subscriptions are free and that I always put “only” next to the word that it belongs with logically.
2. Let me hear more about your thoughts — either about my commentaries or about the books themselves.

Joyous reading!

John Crowe Ransom published his first book of poetry, Poems About God, in 1919, and almost immediately regretted having done so.  The poems in this book, he said, were marred by “blatant and inconsistent theologizing” and a low level of craftsmanship.  Robert Frost and Robert Graves both praised Ransom’s poems, but his mind was unchanged.  He never permitted any of the contents of Poems About God to be reprinted.

“It is a paradox that poetry has to be a technical act, of extreme difficulty, when it wants only to know the untechnical homely fullness of the world,” he wrote years later, and it is hard not to see, in this statement, a personal reference to his own pained discovery of the arduous demands of the art.  His friend Robert Frost put it less elegantly: “Stay out of the poetry game if you don’t have a snout for punishment.”

Frost was referring to his own experience of the severity of reviewers; Ransom, still little known, had enough to face in the severity of his own judgement.

But he persisted in his efforts to learn to write poetry.  He was helped by the advice and encouragement of a group of poetry-loving friends at Vanderbilt University, where he was now a professor of English. Several of the members of this group, including Ransom’s student Robert Penn Warren, would become honored poets, but none achieved maturity as a poet more quickly than Ransom. (And none, in my opinion, would become as good a poet as Ransom.)

In 1924, now a century ago, Ransom published his second book of poetry, Chills and Fever. His progress in the art over the preceedng five years was astonishing. He had found his way to “know the untechnical homely fulness of the world” in poetry that was as distinguished as his earlier poetry had been stumbling and unsure.

In Ransom’s poems, an observer, both tender hearted and tough minded, confronts the ineluctible  finalities: the end of innocence, of love, of illusion, of life itself. Robert Penn Warren, Delmore Schwartz, and  Randall Jarrell have written brilliant essays about the style that Ransom created for himself in order to become this observer. The title poem of his second book is characteristic:

Here lies a lady of beauty and high degree.
Of chills and fever she died, of fever and chills,
The delight of her husband, her aunts, an infant of three,
And of medicos marvelling sweetly on her ills. 

For either she burned and her confident eyes would blaze,
And her fingers fly in a manner to puzzle their heads—
What was she making?  Why, nothing; she sat in a maze
Of old scraps of laces, snipped into curious shreds—

Or this would pass, and the light of her fire decline
Till she lay discouraged and cold as a thin stalk white and blown,
And would not open her eyes, to kisses, to wine;
The sixth of these states was her last; the cold settled down.

Sweet ladies, long may ye bloom, and toughly I hope ye may thole,
But was she not lucky?  In flowers and lace and mourning,
In love and great honour we bade God rest her soul
After six little spaces of chill, and six of burning. 

Delmore Schwartz wrote that Ransom’s work is especially treasured by people who want to learn to write poetry. For these people, and for anyone else who finds in poetry one of ordinary pleasures of life, I recommend The Complete Poems of John Crowe Ransom, edited by Ashby Bland Crowder. This edition contains every poem, published and unpublished, that Ransom is known to have written. The forward by Ransom’s granddaughter, Robb Forman Dew, is worth the price of admission.