Oddity Of The Week: Abraham Lincoln - Poet
Created | Updated Mar 24, 2013
Quick! Which US President was the greatest poet? If you said Jimmy Carter, we'll give you points for literary hipness. But long before our favourite versifying peanut farmer, there was. . .
Abraham Lincoln: Poet
No, Abraham Lincoln didn't fight vampires. And, although he's been played by a lot of actors who are way on their dignity, he wasn't all that stuck-up. Lincoln was a complex sort of genius – pretty much totally self-educated. They're still trying to figure him out. If he were around today, he'd fit right in at h2g2.
He wrote poetry, too.
The scholars are still duking it out as to whether he wrote that suicide poem. But we know he wrote this witty verse:
On Seduction
He also, very definitely, wrote this to mock General Robert E Lee:
We wish we could introduce Mr Lincoln to Rod and jwf, is all we're sayin'.
We also wish he'd met 2legs. You see, Lincoln also wrote a very interesting poem that contains this surprising passage:
No matter where Mr Lincoln happened to fall on the Kinsey Scale, we think he was pretty broad-minded, even if he wasn't quite up to Walt Whitman's standards when it came to verse.
