Boone Ayala’s Reviews > Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America > Status Update

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.