David S. Reynolds

“I believe in you my soul, the other I am must not abase itself to you, And you must not be abased to the other. Loafe with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat, Not words, not music or rhyme I want, not custom or lecture, not even the best, Only the lull I like, the hum of your valvèd voice. I mind how once we lay such a transparent summer morning, How you settled your head athwart my hips and gently turn’d over upon me, And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to my bare-stript heart, And reach’d till you felt my beard, and reach’d till you held my feet. Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass all the art and argument of the earth, And I know that the hand of God is the promise [originally “elderhand”] of my own, And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own, And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers, And that a kelson of the creation is love.”
― David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography

“Lincoln found that Shakespeare’s universal appeal lay in his depiction of shared human qualities. Disloyalty, jealousy, revenge, hatred, madness, self-destructiveness, tomfoolery, devotion, faith, depression—they were all there in Shakespeare’s plays, delivered in language so carefully calibrated that they remained under artistic control.”
― David S. Reynolds, Abe: Abraham Lincoln in His Times