"What Is Found There": Poetry's Role in Environmental Legislation--A Case Study of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation and Yosemite Grant of 1864

William Carlos Williams wrote that it is "difficult" to "get the news in despised poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there" ("To Asphodel, That Green Flower"). Although this claim for the magnitude of poetry seems hyperbole, Williams was a physician whose job was to save lives. He wrote poetry on prescription pads as Rx for personal and civic survival and resilience. This paper considers the improbable role of poetry in civil and human rights, war and peace, and the environment, in a case study of Abraham Lincoln's signing of the Emancipation Proclamation and the Yosemite Grant of 1864. It focuses on the poetry Lincoln memorized, recited, and shared, including Samuel Coleridge, William Cullen Bryant, William Knox, Edgar Allan Poe, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Robert Burns, as well as the Bible, Shakespeare, and Plutarch's Lives. It considers the roles of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau in their public speeches, influencing Lincoln's moral conviction and political courage for the justification of the Civil War and abolition of slavery in 1982, including their support of John Brown. The paper posits a theory about poetry in the national arena as a connective tissue and deep structure of the Emancipation Proclamation and Yosemite Grant, and the ways these acts led to John Muir's poetry-based advocacy of wilderness preservation and the ultimate development of the National Parks Act of 1916.