Inaugural Poetry
Despite Robert Frost’s memorable reading at the inauguration of John F. Kennedy, the tradition of Presidential inauguration poetry is an intermittent one. On a bright and windy day, the 86-year-old Frost was unable to read the poorly typed copy of a new poem entitled “Dedication” he had composed for the occasion. Instead, as he previously agreed with Kennedy, he recited from memory his poem “The Gift Outright,” composed during the Depression and described by the poet as “a history of the United States in a dozen lines of blank verse.”
Kennedy even suggested a slight edit to the poem’s last line. The original poem’s conclusion reads, “Such as she was, such as she would become,” but in a nod to the occasion’s sense of promise and optimism, Frost read it according to Kennedy’s preferred, “such as she will become.”
Thirty-one years later Bill Clinton asked Maya Angelou to read a poem at his inaugural ceremony, and her newly composed work “On the Pulse of the Morning” brought its celebrated author to national prominence 24 years after the publishing of her memoir, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.
Clinton’s second inaugural featured Arkansas poet Miller Williams, whose “Of History and Hope” was a call to its listeners to challenge ignorance and disenfranchisement.
Barack Obama’s inauguration ceremony will feature Elizabeth Alexander, an award-winning poet and Yale professor who worked with Obama at the University of Chicago. She is the daughter of the first African-American Secretary of the Army, Clifford Alexander, who was also a civil rights advisor to President Lyndon Johnson.
Ms. Alexander has spoken of her memories of being present on the Mall in D.C. as a small child along with her family to listen to Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963. As only the fourth poet to read at a Presidential inauguration, Alexander joins an elite company of writers who have sought to challenge the national audience and transcend the political struggles of the moment with their work.
As fellow poet Calvin Trillin has suggested, “It’s more appropriate to have a poem than a prayer” at a Presidential inauguration.
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