A tale of two presidents and two poets, generations apart

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 toward 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 Rep. Stewart Udall, later Kennedy’s Interior secretary. Kennedy was both intrigued and amused with the idea. He joked about the threat that Frost -- he “always steals any show he is part of,” Kennedy said -- might upstage the new president, who 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 telegram 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 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 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 (Massachusetts) High School, he ran down the stairs and drenched his face with cold water to fortify himself for speaking.

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.”

The two poets are products of their time and their background and share a manner that is conversational.

Gorman 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” is 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.

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.