American Adam

John Hollander ( Figure of Echo ) thinks there’s more going on in the Gettysburg Address than “a monument of the antimonumental, of noble plain style”: “the implicit contrasts set up a powerful pair of tropes, and either lack of appropriate access to scripture or exegetical pudeur has passed them over. They might be sketched out as follows: (1) ’ Whereas in the beginning, at Our Father’s command , the earth brought forth grass . . . (Genesis 1:12), a mere fourscore and seven years ago our forefathers brought for on this piece of earth a new nation’ and (2) ‘Whereas man is conceived in sin, this nation was conceived in liberty.’ The rhythm of ‘fourscore . . . forth’ makes us notice the ellipsis of ‘fore(-fathers),’ but that ellipsis itself makes the forebears into secular forms of the pater noster . Thus the two tropes make the new, but now no longer young, nation into a natural, unfallen, non-Adamic being. In the Gettysburg Address, even the word nation is accompanied by biblical resonances.”