Martin Luther King Jr had been shot in Memphis that evening, but five hundred miles away the crowd in Indianapolis did not yet know. Robert F. Kennedy was on the campaign trail, weaving through the nation's cities, and was about to address thousands of predominantly Black residents. An aide told him the news just before he took the stage. Against the advice of the police, he decided to break it himself. The crowd gasped, and then a silence fell as he spoke, pleading for compassion. “My favourite poet was Aeschylus,” he told them. “He once wrote: ‘And even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.’” Indianapolis was one of the few major American cities where no riots broke out that night.
Two months later Kennedy was assassinated. Four years earlier his brother, the president, had met the same fate. The Greek tragedy of Aeschylus seems apt.
After four years of presidential illiteracy, one can be forgiven for forgetting that the White House once championed the arts. Obama tapped into the internet's zeitgeist and used Instagram and Twitter to publish yearly lists of his favourite books, films, shows and songs. More subtle is the relationship between presidents and their affinity for poetry, and for poets. Subtler still is the reframing of presidents as poets themselves: inspiring, and truth-telling in plain sight.
For Jimmy Carter it was Dylan Thomas. He had his three sons memorise Thomas's “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London” when they were young. Visiting London for a summit in 1997, Carter made a special stop at Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey, and was dismayed to find no mention of Thomas among the Blakes and Brontës, the Eliots and Keatses. The archbishop guiding the visit explained that the abbey considered Thomas too disreputable; his alcoholism was well publicised. Carter responded by noting the equally disreputable exploits of Edgar Allan Poe and Lord Byron, among others. Against the archbishop's recommendation, he wrote to the abbey making the case for a memorial to the man he considered the greatest poet of the twentieth century. In 1981, just before Carter left office, a stone was laid in Westminster: a testament to the tenacity of poets and presidents alike.
JFK chose his fellow New Englander, Robert Frost, to read at his inauguration. For Frost, home was not merely a place of residence but his muse, and his early backing of Kennedy, then a junior senator, was strongly influenced by it. Ten months before Kennedy announced his run, Frost remarked: “The next president of the United States will be from Boston. Does that sound as if New England is decaying?” Frost wrote an original poem for the inauguration, but was blinded by sunlight at the podium and recited “The Gift Outright” from memory instead. He published the inauguration poem in the months before his death.
...It makes the prophet in us all presage
The glory of a next Augustan age,
Of a power leading from its strength and pride,
Of young ambition eager to be tried,
Firm in our free beliefs without dismay,
In any game the nations want to play,
A golden age of poetry and power,
Of which this noonday's the beginning hour.
Kennedy returned the favour after the poet's death, speaking at Amherst College, where Frost had taught for forty years. He spoke about the importance of art and of freely accessible institutions, and painted a familiar picture of the artist as revolutionary. “The great artist is thus a solitary figure. He has, as Frost said, a lover's quarrel with the world. In pursuing his perceptions of reality, he must often sail against the currents of his time. This is not a popular role.”
The parallel with politics is easy to draw, but Kennedy went further. For him, poetry was not merely a way to diagnose the world's problems; it was also the cure. “When power narrows the areas of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses, for art establishes the basic human truths which must serve as the touchstone of our judgment.”
The list goes on. Clinton adored Heaney and asked Maya Angelou to perform at his inauguration. Truman admired Tennyson. Ford memorised Kipling, a fellow freemason. Lincoln thought Robert Burns a genius and recited him daily; he claimed the war could not have been won without the Scotsman's words. “From Shakespeare I learnt the sonnets,” he wrote. “From the Bible, the scriptures. But it was from that man I learnt humanity.” Lincoln planned a pilgrimage to Scotland, but missed the ship. A few days later, having booked a new ticket, he was assassinated.
Obama stands apart, not as his successor did, as a man of few joys, but as a president with many. He is a reader of Gwendolyn Brooks, from the south side of Chicago, whose poems brim with allusions to music and the civil rights movement, and who could fuse scholarly technique with the everyday and a striving for better.
We real cool. We
Left school. We
Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We
Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We
Jazz June. We
Die soon.
The poet Elizabeth Alexander was chosen for his inauguration, only the fourth time a poet had been asked. Alexander, a young Yale professor already shortlisted for the Pulitzer, was little known outside academic circles. But a young, politically astute, African American scholar with the ability to inspire seemed a sensible choice for the occasion.
In 2009 the president hosted the first White House Poetry Jam. There Lin- Manuel Miranda performed the song “Alexander Hamilton” for the first time, to laughs at first about the ludicrous subject matter, then a bewitched silence, and finally a standing ovation from the president and first lady.
It is no surprise Obama loved Hamilton: a distillation of American-dream ideals and hip-hop. Hip-hop is to poetry what poetry is to hip-hop; they are one and the same. A run of rappers performed at the White House between 2009 and 2016, among them Common, J. Cole and Chance the Rapper. Kendrick Lamar's “How Much a Dollar Cost” was Obama's favourite song of 2015. Its album, To Pimp a Butterfly, was saturated with racial inequality, police brutality, Christian theology, depression and resilience, over a backdrop of jazz, spoken word and soul. Lamar would become the first rapper to win the Pulitzer for music.
I wash my hands, I said my grace, what more do you want from me?
Tears of a clown, guess I'm not all what is meant to be,
Shades of grey will never change if I condone,
Turn this page, help me change, to right my wrongs.
For Biden, more straightforwardly, it is Seamus Heaney. Plenty has been written about the choice. Was Heaney a homage to Biden's Irish ancestry? Possibly, though the non-Irish Clinton also admired both Heaney and Biden's favourite poem, The Cure at Troy. Its last lines, “Of justice can rise up, / And hope and history rhyme,” have appeared in countless campaign speeches and advertisements. In a circular feat of cross-cultural ties, Ireland's national news channel ended its broadcast announcing Biden's win with a clip of the president-elect reciting the poem.
Tragedy defines Biden as it did the Kennedys. Days after he became a twenty-nine-year-old senator, his wife and daughter were killed in a car crash and his two sons seriously injured. He was sworn in at his sons' hospital bedside. Decades later, the eldest, Beau, died of complications from a brain tumour. Fintan O'Toole, in an essay titled “The Designated Mourner”, calls Biden the most gothic figure in American politics.
Though The Cure at Troy ends in rhyming hope, Heaney was adapting the Sophoclean tragedy Philoctetes, with trauma its defining theme. Heaney's own life had been touched by it: his youngest brother, aged four, was hit by a car as his siblings looked on. His choice of Philoctetes, and later Antigone, was deliberate though, as he noted, not original; Yeats had translated swathes of Sophocles a century earlier, with allusions to the Irish struggle. Heaney hoped his version might “illuminate the conflict in Northern Ireland, the conflict that is within individuals as well as within the society.” He also drew on the mood across the Atlantic, post-9/11 and on the cusp of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. “There was the obvious parallel between George W. Bush and Creon.” Here, as with Frost and Kennedy, the reverse happened: a president inspired a poet.
Maybe presidents see themselves as poets, and want others to do the same. Maybe they idolise poets and imagine themselves as having taken the darker path. Maybe the explanation is simpler, and tragedy is what binds presidents and poets alike. Either way, Kennedy, and his brother, would not have wanted us to forget Aeschylus, and what poetry can do: to “tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.”