Amanda Gorman is celebrated
It began with an old poet saluting a young president. Sixty years later, it was a young poet saluting an old president.
Robert Frost, 86 years old in 1961, spoke at the inauguration of John F. Kennedy, 43 years old. Amanda Gorman, 22 years old, sparkled at the inauguration of Joseph R. Biden Jr., 78 years old. The two are bookends in a tradition that includes Maya Angelou and Elizabeth Alexander.
This melding of poets and presidents originated with Rep. Stewart Udall, later Kennedy’s Interior secretary.
In a telegram to Kennedy, Frost wrote: “If you can bear at your age the honor of being made president of the United States, I ought to be able at my age to bear the honor of taking some part in your inauguration. I may not be equal to it but I can accept it for my cause — the arts, poetry, now for the first time taken into the affairs of statesmen.”
Gorman accepted with similar eagerness the invitation from a 21st-century president-elect.
“I said yes immediately then danced around and screamed,” she told The Washington Post. “But I can tell you with all that joy there was still a huge sensation of responsibility … it was a ‘heck yes’ and then ‘let me get writing!’”
This tale of two poets has a poetry all its own.
Frost opened his poem “The Gift Outright” with an unforgettable line: “The land was ours before we were the land’s.” So poignant a notion was it that Gorman alluded to it, writing, “the dawn is ours before we knew it.”
Both were classically American in their informality. Frost sometimes shortened “because” to “‘cause” or said “gotta.” In her poem, Gorman spoke of “the norms and notions of what just is,” arguing that it “isn’t always just-ice.”
The two poets are products of their time and their background, to be sure, but they share a manner that is conversational. Frost called his literary peregrinations “barding around.” Gorman, inspired by tweets and Frederick Douglass, hasn’t had much time for barding around, but she showed at the Biden inauguration that she knows her way around the world:
We close the divide because we know to put our future first,
we must first put our differences aside
We lay down our arms so we can reach out our arms to one another
We seek harm to none and harmony for all
“She did a terrific job, and with one of the more complicated inaugural poems,” said Dawn Lundy Martin, a University of Pittsburgh poet and winner of the Academy of American Arts and Science’s May Sarton Prize for Poetry. “It was frank about the context of the past four years but it was also optimistic. It was wise beyond the years of a 22-year-old, and I was very moved.”
Indeed, a nation was moved by these words:
We are striving to forge a union with purpose
To compose a country committed to all cultures, colors, characters and conditions of man
So we lift our gazes not to what stands between us but what stands before us
In some notebook jottings published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1951, Frost wrote that the “best educated person is one who has been matured at just the proper rate. Seasoned but not kiln dried.”
Amanda Gorman, at 22, is seasoned but, as America saw last week, not kiln dried.