Saturday, May 26, 2007

Angels and Ages ...

... Adam Gopnik on Lincoln’s language and its legacy.

"Lincoln’s rhetoric is, instead, deliberately Biblical. (It is difficult to find a single obviously classical reference in all of his speeches.) Lincoln had mastered the sound of the King James Bible so completely that he could recast abstract issues of constitutional law in Biblical terms ... "

"... undeniably, as the war and his Presidency progressed, Lincoln spoke increasingly of God—inserted God, as it seems, into the Gettysburg Address—and evidently had some kind of complicated and rich sense of 'necessity' and a supernatural presiding power."

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