Status Updates From Lincoln at Gettysburg: The ...

God I want to sharpen my prose like this - Willa’s own talents and his celebration of Lincoln’s rhetorical skill has me eager to improve my own craft.

Wills identifies three main influences for the Gettysburg Address: the funeral oratory of the Greek Revival, especially Pericles’s oration; the rural cemetery movement and the 19th century Romantic conceptions of death and rebirth as cyclical; and the transcendentalist movement, with its emphasis on the tension between transcendent ideals and particular reality.