Thanks for facts!

“Presidents’ Day” seems to have grown up organically around the elimination of the observance of both Lincoln’s birthday and Washington’s birthday in some states, though both are still observed in some states. Only 21 states call Washington’s birthday “Presidents’ Day”.

I can see why some people think the two holidays were somehow combined in “Presidents’ Day”, but that’s not actually what happened. Some governments never observed both (Delaware and California don’t observe either), and some still observe both, and most don’t even use the name “Presidents’ Day”.

The move of the Federal observance of Washington’s birthday to the third Monday of February was made in 1968, before Martin Luther King was even assassinated, and was done only to create long weekends (Columbus Day and Memorial Day were also moved).

To DNW’s Q, the Eminem song gives the answer:
“You better lose yourself in the music
The moment, you own it, you better never it go.”

Lose yourself, stop thinking of you, just enjoy.
Enjoy the moment.

Certainly dance and music for enjoyment, tho also those emotive warbles for those whose emotions are touched. Music touches me, my emotions, poetry doesn’t. Dancing very much does, watching dance mostly not, and nowadays watching sports mostly not.
Watching dance, or sport, evokes emotions and memories in the watchers. For sport, it’s only really fun to watch if you know the rules and care who wins.
Most folk feel emotion only when they care.
Progressives, Conservatives, Libertarians all care, but focus on a certain axis.
Oppression, Civilization, Freedom.

Progressives are practicing caring only about the oppressed victims.
And most everyone wants to be good, with being in a crowd making one feel better than being alone, usually.

–Walt Whitman, “I Hear America Singing”

Tom+Grey:

Whtiman was a man of the people and he paid his dues big time as a nurse to the wounded in the Civil War. Or here’s his quote on the relationship of poet to society:
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Whitman wrote in the preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass: “The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it.” He believed there was a vital, symbiotic relationship between the poet and society. He emphasized this connection especially in “Song of Myself” by using an all-powerful first-person narration.[ An American epic, it deviated from the historic use of an elevated hero and instead assumed the identity of the common people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walt_Whitman
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I read his reluctance about “O Captain!” as somewhat as if the Beatles kept being asked to play “I Want to Hold Your Hand” after they had created “Revolver” and “Sgt. Pepper’s.”

I don’t know the answer to your question, but I suspect brain structure is somehow part of it. However, dance and poetry are very different from each other and I wouldn’t lump them together at all except that both are in the realm of the arts. Poetry is verbal and dance is non-verbal.

Coffin that passes through lanes and streets,
Through day and night with the great cloud darkening the land,
With the pomp of the inloop’d flags with the cities draped in black,
With the show of the States themselves as of crape-veil’d women standing,
With processions long and winding and the flambeaus of the night,
With the countless torches lit, with the silent sea of faces and the unbared heads,
With the waiting depot, the arriving coffin, and the sombre faces,
With dirges through the night, with the thousand voices rising strong and solemn,
With all the mournful voices of the dirges pour’d around the coffin,
The dim-lit churches and the shuddering organs—where amid these you journey,
With the tolling tolling bells’ perpetual clang,
Here, coffin that slowly passes,
I give you my sprig of lilac.

It’s a much longer poem, and the stanzas to death at the end probably weren’t judged fitting for classroom study and memorization:

Come lovely and soothing death,
Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving,
In the day, in the night, to all, to each,
Sooner or later delicate death.
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Edgar Lee Masters and Vachel Lindsay both came from Lincoln country in Illinois. Masters despised Lincoln. Lindsay idolized him. Lindsay’s once well-known poem “Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight” has more to do with the First World War than with Lincoln or his times.

INTRODUCTION
You know the old saying: “If you cannot say something good about someone …” . And, ” Don’t speal ill of the dead. ”

But Whitman’s been food for the worms for a mighty long time and it’s probably doing him no injustice to mention that encountering his name or an image of his face, instantly brings to mind his enthusiastic letters to his “gossips” recounting his adventures cruising the wards of the military hospitals as part of his volunteer work. A little side benefit as he may have viewed it. That is how he is weighed in the moral balance from my perspective with the poetry counting for nothing and stirring no reaction.

THE MAIN POINT

But that may be unfair according to the norms of the prevailing order, or perhaps any to other where afficionados are bound to exist in fair numbers.

For in witnessing to the grandeur of the emotive warbles emitted by the sensitive male, they celebrate something that, while faintly visible if hardly noticeable to me as an artifact or phenomenon, is fundamentally incomprehensible in rationale. The question in exaggerated form is not “how good is it as an example of its type”, but “how can you bring yourself to tolerate any of it?”

Which may be related to why dance – for the most part unless it is an attractive and shapely woman flinging herself around or some guy knocking out a clever quick step – is like watching a pot of water slowly boil. “Yeah, ok, now what”

THE REAL AND GENERAL SIGNIFICANCE

Which is part of what makes this blog interesting. How can people who perceive much in roughly the same way, be so utterly alien in other sensibilities to one another in what we call an aesthetic sense.

My studies in psychology never touched on such matters and are so many decades out of date that they would be useless to revisit anyway.

THE IMPLICATION

Three things that are incomprehensible to me except in vague outline or minimal aspect and provoke reactions other than appreciation, stir genuine enthusiasm in others:
Liberalism or collective sensibility
Poetry
and Dance.

THE CONCLUDING POSITS

[Do ] these activity/interests all share some characteristic or motivating force [?]

[I wonder then, if ] they form an attribute category of some kind.

THE QUESTION

What is the defining essence of that nameless category?