Whitman's Lincoln

081214.3:50pm

Today I finally bought my own copy of Whitman's Leaves of Grass and it included the text of Specimen Days. That's the book that I bought for Nicole for her birthday (our birthday). Here is the excerpt that inspired my poem Walt Whitman For My Birthday:

"The Inauguration - March 4 - The President very quietly rode down to the Capitol in his own carriage, by himself, on a sharp trot, about noon, either because he wish'd to be on hand to sign bills, &c., or to get rid of marching in line with the absurd procession, the muslin Temple of Liberty, and pasteboard Monitor. I saw him on his return, at three o'clock, after the performance was over. He was in his plain two-horse barouche, and look'd very much worn and tired; the lines, indeed, of vast responsibilities, intricate questions, and demands of life and death, cut deeper than ever upon his dark brown face; yet all the old goodness, tenderness, sadness and canny shrewdness, underneath the furrows. (I never see that man without feeling that he is one to become personally attach'd to, for his combination of purest, heartiest tenderness, and native Western even rudest forms of manliness.)"

- Walt Whitman, Specimen Days

"He hated it when you called him a moron. All morons hate it when you call them a moron."

- J.D. Salinger - The Catcher in the Rye