All Poetry Biography
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Midday on Monday, the relatively unknown Cuban-American poet Richard Blanco will be the fifth poet to read at the inauguration of an American President, joining the company of Robert Frost (Kennedy, 1961), Maya Angelou (Clinton, 1993), Miller Williams (Clinton, 1997), and Elizabeth Alexander (Obama, 2009). Blanco will read an original composition, just as Angelou, Williams, and Alexander have done before him. Frost also wrote a new poem for the occasion, but he was eighty-six at the time, and, famously, the frigid, blustery weather and glaring sun in Washington that day made reading difficult. So he abandoned the new poem and recited one that Kennedy had requested, “The Gift Outright,” from memory.
The first lines from the poem that Frost didn’t read that day make note of the novelty of inviting a poet to a convocation of the government: “Summoning artists to participate / In the august occasions of the state / Seems something artists ought to celebrate.” It ends with the even more optimistic idea of the aims of art and politics uniting: “A golden age of poetry and power / Of which this noonday’s the beginning hour.” Perhaps Frost, in his final years, was merely flattered by the attention, or won over by Kennedy’s charms, and thus spun off his poem in a hopeful mood. Yet, in many ways, Kennedy’s election did seem to herald a kind of enlightened, cosmopolitan modernity—an ethos that was enhanced by the appearance of a poet, even if that poet was not a controversial young upstart but, rather, a national treasure. (It was Frost, not Ginsberg. up there on the dais, after all.) Frost’s optimism, seen through the decade of the Vietnam conflict that would follow, now seems misplaced. Poetry and power were kept, as they often are, at quite a distance. And be wary of golden ages: there would not be another inaugural poet for more than three decades.
Even so, Frost’s appearance was momentous, and the obscuring sunlight delivered the country a better blessing in “The Gift Outright,” a poem that, like much of Frost, might be misread as forthright and simple—a mere patriotic ode to an American birthright. But a close read shows that the verse, with its most resonant phrase, “land vaguely realizing westward,” suggests the lurching and darker qualities of Manifest Destiny, and plants doubt about the supposed purity of the American experiment. It is that doubt—poetry’s ability to muddy a pat phrase or dislodge an accepted truism with an unexpected word or other sleight of hand—that made Frost’s performance resonate. He introduced, if only for a moment, a twitch of dissent amidst the pomp.
Eight years earlier, following the election of Dwight Eisenhower over Adlai Stevenson, the “age of poetry and power” might have seemed a cruel fantasy. That November, the poet Robert Lowell summed up the alienation that many artists and intellectuals felt, writing in a letter from Rome to the Dutch literary critic W. F. van Leeuwen:
The election is symbolically discouraging. We were frantic Stevenson fans, buying three papers a day, reading the complete speeches, etc. I think Stevenson was the most human, intelligent and decent person who has run for president in my lifetime. Eisenhower isn’t a bad man, I think, just formless, banal, efficient—smiles without personal wit or passions. He’s so appallingly typical—I come back to my figure of a country looking at itself in the mirror for instruction.
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Midday on Monday, the relatively unknown Cuban-American poet Richard Blanco will be the fifth poet to read at the inauguration of an American President, joining the company of Robert Frost (Kennedy, 1961), Maya Angelou (Clinton, 1993), Miller Williams (Clinton, 1997), and Elizabeth Alexander (Obama, 2009). Blanco will read an original composition, just as Angelou, Williams, and Alexander have done before him. Frost also wrote a new poem for the occasion, but he was eighty-six at the time, and, famously, the frigid, blustery weather and glaring sun in Washington that day made reading difficult. So he abandoned the new poem and recited one that Kennedy had requested, “The Gift Outright,” from memory.
The first lines from the poem that Frost didn’t read that day make note of the novelty of inviting a poet to a convocation of the government: “Summoning artists to participate / In the august occasions of the state / Seems something artists ought to celebrate.” It ends with the even more optimistic idea of the aims of art and politics uniting: “A golden age of poetry and power / Of which this noonday’s the beginning hour.” Perhaps Frost, in his final years, was merely flattered by the attention, or won over by Kennedy’s charms, and thus spun off his poem in a hopeful mood. Yet, in many ways, Kennedy’s election did seem to herald a kind of enlightened, cosmopolitan modernity—an ethos that was enhanced by the appearance of a poet, even if that poet was not a controversial young upstart but, rather, a national treasure. (It was Frost, not Ginsberg. up there on the dais, after all.) Frost’s optimism, seen through the decade of the Vietnam conflict that would follow, now seems misplaced. Poetry and power were kept, as they often are, at quite a distance. And be wary of golden ages: there would not be another inaugural poet for more than three decades.
Even so, Frost’s appearance was momentous, and the obscuring sunlight delivered the country a better blessing in “The Gift Outright,” a poem that, like much of Frost, might be misread as forthright and simple—a mere patriotic ode to an American birthright. But a close read shows that the verse, with its most resonant phrase, “land vaguely realizing westward,” suggests the lurching and darker qualities of Manifest Destiny, and plants doubt about the supposed purity of the American experiment. It is that doubt—poetry’s ability to muddy a pat phrase or dislodge an accepted truism with an unexpected word or other sleight of hand—that made Frost’s performance resonate. He introduced, if only for a moment, a twitch of dissent amidst the pomp.
Eight years earlier, following the election of Dwight Eisenhower over Adlai Stevenson, the “age of poetry and power” might have seemed a cruel fantasy. That November, the poet Robert Lowell summed up the alienation that many artists and intellectuals felt, writing in a letter from Rome to the Dutch literary critic W. F. van Leeuwen:
The election is symbolically discouraging. We were frantic Stevenson fans, buying three papers a day, reading the complete speeches, etc. I think Stevenson was the most human, intelligent and decent person who has run for president in my lifetime. Eisenhower isn’t a bad man, I think, just formless, banal, efficient—smiles without personal wit or passions. He’s so appallingly typical—I come back to my figure of a country looking at itself in the mirror for instruction.
All Poetry 2013 Pics Images Photos Pictures
All Poetry 2013 Pics Images Photos Pictures
All Poetry 2013 Pics Images Photos Pictures
All Poetry 2013 Pics Images Photos Pictures
All Poetry 2013 Pics Images Photos Pictures
All Poetry 2013 Pics Images Photos Pictures
All Poetry 2013 Pics Images Photos Pictures
All Poetry 2013 Pics Images Photos Pictures
All Poetry 2013 Pics Images Photos Pictures
All Poetry 2013 Pics Images Photos Pictures
All Poetry 2013 Pics Images Photos Pictures
All Poetry 2013 Pics Images Photos Pictures
All Poetry 2013 Pics Images Photos Pictures
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