Amanda Gorman sparkled at Biden inauguration

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. Twice he asked a pastor to read one of his poems at the Congregational Church in Derry, New Hampshire, 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 would become.” Though with a backward reference to 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 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, in