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I’ve been reading, over the past week, the 61
poems and their commentaries that make up Dan Guillory’s The Lincoln Poems. It’s
been a more moving experience than I thought possible — not that I
doubted the poems, but I’ve never been a “sustained”
poetry reader, and I have also been so surrounded with Lincoln during the
many years I’ve lived in Springfield that in a sense I’ve been
vaccinated. I’ve known the stories everyone knows but few of the
details. These poems follow Lincoln’s life from his
boyhood, when seeds he’d cleared the land to plant were washed away
in a downpour, to his death and aftermath (“No, it wasn’t
supposed to end this way.”). Though the poems are brief and
economical, the commentary on each, though also brief, is often longer. And
they are spoken not from outside looking on, but from inside
Lincoln’s head. Sometimes his actual words are used, but more often
they are his imagined words and thoughts, which come off as not only
possible but probable. Like the man, they are a mixture of the simple and
complex. With some exceptions, they are about small moments in
Lincoln’s life. In his preface, Guillory says, “These poems are
not intended to chart or identify ‘peak moments’ in
Lincoln’s life. The goal, rather, is to dramatize small, transcendent
moments when the all-too-rational Lincoln was carried beyond himself, if
only for an instant.”
One poem, “Deism in Little Things,” could
stand for this aim; some of these moments are the moving of a piano, the
pulling of a tooth, blackberrying with a son. In the process, we learn the
climate and the flora of the prairie; we see a primitive Springfield
growing into a city, a primitive Illinois growing into a state — and
a young man growing into presidential stature. The small, even homely
things sometimes gain a larger perspective, such as when Lincoln compares
his own problems on the privy with the constipation of the Army of the
Potomac, mired in the mud. They can be humorous: he describes the annoying
pigs under the Taylorville courthouse yet adds a sting, pairing them with
himself and fellow lawyers who stick their snouts into “every
unspeakable place.” Some humor is soft, some simply fun and vulgar
(Lincoln did tell vulgar jokes) — he recalls a night spent on the
circuit with a behemoth colleague with whom he must sleep, after a supper
of beans and cornpone, thusly: “Bedding down with the Lawyer for the Defense/Who
farts all night, punctuating his brief.”
It may seem presumptuous of anyone to give Lincoln
feelings when the man was so good at concealing them, but these are usually
on such homely subjects, and ring so true, that the reader, instead of
feeling suspicious, says, if questioning at all, yes — he might well
have felt that way. This is also true of the bitter poems and at least one
veiled yet sexually explicit one.
There are too many fine lines to quote: On New Salem
Village, “Smoke licks the clouds, and every cedared roof /Finds its
pointed place in the blueness,” and on Lincoln’s voracious
reading, “But the Prairie was my true Grammarian,/The small, bright
Orations of springtime,/The unforgiving syntax of Winter . . . ”
The commentaries accompanying each poem are necessary
for understanding the poems’ points of reference, such as the
historical context, and are good, though strange reading in themselves, for
as explication they are not crafted essays. They begin as such, then often
end abruptly with a few pieces of apparently unrelated information.
Sometimes they let us know where Guillory found the small fact the poem is
built upon and so we learn Lincoln scholarship, much of it obscure. There
is repetition; we need to know more than once the cookbook Mary Todd used,
or about Blackstone, for some will not read this collection as a novel,
retaining the past commentaries. There is little temptation to read the
commentaries and skip the poems, for everything in the former points to the
following poem. I find that these coupled vignettes are leading me on
to more reading about Lincoln; they are teasers to force us to do so. This
is a fine book, well crafted, well produced, and complete in itself, but it
also has a value to drive one further into investigating this man who, in
my travels abroad, I have found, is better known than any other American. A final word on the last three poems. “Contents
of My Pockets, April 14, 1865”; “Bullet in My Brain, April 15,
1865”; and “Alternate Ending”: These are a tour de force.
I have never felt Lincoln’s death more keenly than in reading this
trio, after the cumulative effect of the whole book. They are
unforgettable.
Jacqueline Jackson, books and poetry editor of Illinois Times, is a professor emerita of English at the University of Illinois at Springfield.
This article appears in Apr 24-30, 2008.
