The Poetics of Inauguration

Here's an interesting combination of politics and art.

Elizabeth Alexander is about to become only the fourth inaugural poet in American history, so Jeremy Axelrod over at Culture11 has written an analysis of her work as well as of the three previous inaugural poets: Robert Frost in 1961, Maya Angelou in 1993, and Miller Williams in 1997.

Axelrod's article isn't a complete critique of the entirety of these poets' works. But it is a balanced look at their overall strengths and weaknesses as poets, in light of the very unique and, in some ways, conflicting challenges that accompany writing poetry for an inauguration.

Those challenges are greater than you might think. Even Robert Frost, whose subtlety and insights into the ambiguities of modern and especially American potential Axelrod illustrates in his article, yielded a rather amateur and bland poem for the occasion of Kennedy's inauguration. (Luckily he couldn't see to read it, and instead recited from memory a more intelligent and nuanced work.)

Axelrod describes what "a truly strong inaugural poem should be":

a work that reveals the obligation of the president to history as much as to the present and future; a poem, in other words, that is alive to the centuries of promise that weigh on a new president in a new year

But there is a tension between the inherent depth of poetic communication, demanding thoughtful contemplation, versus the pep-rally emotion of the inaugural victory party:

If poetry brings any aspect of life into keener focus, it is at a level too subtle, and often too dark, for mere oratory. To both celebrate Obama’s inauguration and give it a richer meaning, then, Alexander will have to tread warily between depth and shallow patriotic cheer.

Now, it really isn't a bad thing to celebrate at an inauguration, anymore than at a party convention. The mob emotion that is generated at such events is a great way to motivate troops that must be motivated. One must only hope that the ideology underlying the troops and their generals is correct. And an inaugural poem has the potential to remind euphoric attendees of the intellectual foundation of their movement -- i.e., it's the perfect opportunity to look at the *content* (if any) of catchphrases like "Change". :-)