Gorman’s poetry recalls Frost at Kennedy’s inaugural
Your Turn
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, and together they speak to Kennedy’s notion that “when power leads man towards arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations.
“When power narrows the areas of man’s concern,” Kennedy continued, “poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence.”
This melding of poets and presidents originated with U.S. Rep. Stewart Udall of Arizona, later Kennedy’s interior secretary. Kennedy was both intrigued and amused with the idea. He joked that Frost — he “always steals any show he is part of,” Kennedy said — might upstage the new president, who had adopted a Frost phrase from “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” to close his stump speech:
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
The idea animated Frost, who in undelivered verse said,
Summoning artists to participate In the august occasions of the state Seems something artists ought to celebrate.
So in a letter to Kennedy, he 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 you (because) the arts, poetry, now for the first time (are) taken into the affairs of statesmen.”
Gorman accepted with similar eagerness the invitation from a 21st-century president-elect who often quotes Seamus Heaney on the “tidal wave” of justice when “hope and history rhyme.”
“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.
She, like Biden, has a speech impediment. Frost was consumed with stage fright. As the 1892 valedictorian at Lawrence (Mass.) High School, he ran down the stairs and drenched his face with cold water to fortify himself for speaking. Twice he asked a pastor to read one of his poems at the Congregational Church in Derry, N.H., because he could not bear to do it himself. But not so Gorman, part of Wednesday’s transfer of power and transfusion of new blood. She stood with a poise that was elegant, and eloquence itself.
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.”
Frost’s poem looked at the nation before its creation and ended by invoking what “she will become.” Though with a backward reference of the musical “Hamilton,” Gorman focused on the present and the possibility of a better future, speaking of a “nation that isn’t broken, but simply unfinished.”
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 were 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
These are words her grandchildren’s grammar-school classmates will memorize, much the way today’s grandparents memorized “The Road Not Taken” and its meditation on two roads that “diverged in a wood.” Those schoolchildren of the future will understand that the title “The Hill We Climb” was both a metaphor and a reference — “We’ve seen a force that would shatter our nation rather than share it” — to the rioters who besieged the Capitol two weeks before the Inauguration in which Gorman had her star turn.
“Seeing her up there — so sophisticated, so capable — reminded me that in America we want to show how bringing people together doesn’t take away,” said Toi Derricotte, co-founder of Cave Canem, a home for Black poets. “It creates possibility.”
And while Gorman now has global celebrity for her invocation of “a new dawn,” it was a passage of prose that was her first lesson. Repeatedly, her mother read out loud her Miranda rights that grew out of a 1966 Supreme Court ruling: “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can be used against you in court.”
Gorman has not remained silent, and the things she has said resonate far beyond the nation’s courtrooms.
“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
And 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 kilndried.”
Amanda Gorman, at 22, is seasoned but, as America saw last week, not kilndried.
David M. Shribman is executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Email dshribman@post-gazette.com. Twitter: @ShribmanPG