Whom did Lincoln admire?

[Anita]

(03-26-2019 06:22 PM)mbgross Wrote:  I thought that quote was in reference to William Knox. Not sure.

Me too.

http://housedivided.dickinson.edu/sites/...l-18-1846/

“He preferred such lugubrious woks as the poem “Mortality” by William Knox. ‘I would give all I am worth, and go into debt, to be able to write so fine a piece as I think that is,’ he said in 1846. Lawrence Weldon observed him, at day’s end on the circuit, sit ‘by the decaying embers of an old-fashioned fire-place’ and ‘quote at length’ from ‘Mortality.’ He told friends that Knox’s verses ‘sounded to him as much like true poetry as anything he had ever heard.’
—Michael Burlingame, The Inner World of Abraham Lincoln (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 108.