What Abe Lincoln said - The Monday Morning Memo

According the the Lincoln Museum,
Abraham Lincoln was a harsh critic of the anti-immigrant ‘Know Nothing’ movement of the 1850s. He seemed to particularly resent their claims of patriotism while trying to take freedoms away from targeted groups.

On August 24, 1855, Abe said in a private letter to Joshua Speed,

“I am not a Know-Nothing—that is certain. How could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that ‘all men are created equal.’ We now practically read it ‘all men are created equal, except negroes.’ When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read ‘all men are created equals, except negroes and foreigners and Catholics.’ When it comes to that, I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.”

“Robert Frost provided a valuable clue when he spoke of “the pleasure of taking pains.” The paradox here is simply verbal. Frost meant precisely what the German critic Baumgarten meant when he spoke of the central impulse toward poetry (and toward all art) as the Spieltrieb, the play impulse.

An excellent native example of the play impulse in poetry is the child clapping its hands in response to a Mother Goose rhyme. What does a child care for “meaning”? What on earth is the “meaning” of the following poem?

High Diddle diddle
The cat and the fiddle
The cow jumped over the moon;
The little dog laughed
To see such craft
And the dish ran away with the spoon.

“Preposterous,” says Mr. Gradgrind. But the child is wiser: he is busy having a good time with the poem. The poem pleases and involves him. He responds to it in an immediate muscular way. He recognizes its performance at once and wants to act with it.

This is the first level of play. As rhythm is the first element of music. The child claps hands, has fun, and the play involves practically no thoughtful activity. Beyond this level of response, there begins the kind of play whose pleasure lies for the poet in overcoming meaningful and thoughtful (and “feelingful”) difficulties, and for the reader in identifying with the poet in that activity.”

- John Anthony Ciardi, How Does a Poem Mean?