In the margins of his arithmetic notebook, an adolescent Abraham Lincoln scrawled a few lines of doggerel that may or may not be original but that signal the self-deprecating wit that would become a trademark of the mature Lincoln's self-presentation as a politician:

Although they have been preserved because of Lincoln's iconic stature, these juvenile verses offer a new angle onto the cultural position of poetry in the United States during Lincoln's lifetime. Read as an exemplar of poetry's crucial role in the schoolroom, these lines underline the centrality of poetry to Lincoln's education and to his development as a writer and speaker, a topic that this essay will explore by considering both the poetry that Lincoln read and the poems that he wrote over the course of his life.

Lincoln's love of poetry is widely documented in the scholarship about him. Biographers almost invariably mention his fondness for Shakespeare and Robert Burns, as well as favorite poems such as William Knox's “Mortality,” Thomas Gray's “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” and Oliver Wendell Holmes's “The Last Leaf.” Lincoln's skill at storytelling and his love of folk idiom are also frequently noted. The connections between his love of poetry and his love of oral folk culture receive far less mention, however. In nineteenth-century America, poetry was a literary genre that was embedded in popular culture and that often circulated via oral means: The memorization, recitation, and reading aloud of poetry were integral components of schoolroom pedagogy, and although Lincoln had only scattershot experience with formal schooling, already as a boy he had developed a lifelong habit of memorizing favorite poems, slipping excerpts from his store of memorized work into both conversation and written pieces (Armenti).