Seven Poems that Should Have Been Read at Presidential Inaugurations

The reading of poems at Presidential inaugurations is a relatively new event in American history. A couple weeks ago, Amanda Gorman became only the sixth poet invited to read at a Presidential inauguration. Five of these inaugural poems have been presented in the last 28 years, with the only exception being Robert Frost’s recitation of “The Gift Outright” at John F. Kennedy’s 1961 inauguration.

There’s probably an essay to be written about why inaugural poetry might have emerged at this late date, at least among Democrats, as a nascent tradition. Is it just Kennedy’s charisma still looming over his party? Is it an example of a secularizing country (or party) looking for a non-religious means of solemnifying a civic event? Is it a perverse joke wherein a three-minute poem is rolled out to atone for denigrating the arts and humanities at all other times of year? 

As someone who teaches students about the history of poetry, I have a more speculative question: what might inaugural poetry have looked like through the years if it were a longer-standing tradition? What poets and poems might have appeared? The obvious truth is that if poems had been read at every inauguration ceremony, most of them would have been milquetoast work from poets long-forgotten. Such is the nature of art placed in the service of decorum. It’s not like anyone with actual power would ever let Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, Adrienne Rich, or Danez Smith anywhere near that dais. 

But since inaugural poetry has, through most of American history, been a thing that never happened, I’m free to daydream about what might have been especially good poems for the occasion. I thought about going truly nuts and proposing a poem for literally every inauguration since 1789. But since I have an actual job which currently presents me with a maze of brush fires, I limited myself to picking a handful of poems from the early-to-mid twentieth century that might have been particularly powerful commentaries at one of our core civic ceremonies.

1925: William Carlos Williams, “It Is a Living Coral”

There are a lot of Williams poems I could choose, since few major poets outside of Whitman have been so inclined to take America itself as their subject matter. But “It Is a Living Coral,” Williams’ celebration of the Capitol building, feels especially poignant after January 6, so we’ll assign WCW the task of dignifying the inauguration of Calvin Coolidge.

Williams’ poem, which first appeared in 1924, turns the solidity and mass of the Capitol into a living, lovely thing: “a dome/ eight million pounds/ in weight/ iron plates constructed/ to expand/ and contract with/ variations/ of temperature/ the folding/ and unfolding of a lily.” Williams then spins into a giddy catalog of the paintings and sculptures that fill the Capitol dome, and the poem starts to feel like a not-quite-orderly montage of American history. With his pure energy and capacity for slightly irreverent awe, Williams makes this “archaic” building a metonym for a nation he hopes can be as flexible as it is massive.

1929: Marianne Moore, “England”

Despite the title, this poem is primarily about the US; it just takes Moore a few lines of epigrammatic takes on foreign country countries before she settles into her main topic, America, “where there are no proofreaders, no silkworms, no digressions,” and where “letters are written/ not in Spanish, not in Greek, not in Latin, not in shorthand,/ but in plain American which cats and dogs can read!” It would be fun to watch Senators and Justices try to puzzle out whether and how much this is supposed to be funny, and to what degree the joke is at their expense.

I hope that someday a Republican invites a poet to read at the inauguration, as inaugural poems have thus far been a strictly Democratic affair. Moore would have been honored to read at the 1929 inauguration, as she came from a pro-GOP family that held Herbert Hoover in great esteem for his WWI-era relief efforts. At the end of her poem, Moore insists that if culture is hard to find in America, “must one imagine/ that it is not there? It has never been confined to one locality.” It would also be nice to imagine that poetry needn’t be confined to one party.

1933: Sterling Brown, “Strong Men”

In an alternate universe where poems had been read at every inauguration, it’s safe to assume that the list of poets would have been exclusively white for a very long time. I’d like to believe that a person of color would have been chosen as an inaugural poet long before Maya Angelou in 1993, but if I’m being honest, I also suspect that inaugural poetry’s color line would have endured longer than Major League Baseball’s.  

So I very much doubt that Sterling Brown would have been selected to read at an inauguration in 1933. But in an alternate universe where a black poet could have read at FDR’s first inauguration, Washington D.C. native Brown, whose best poems are deeply democratic and American, would have been a fantastic choice. 

“Strong Men'' in particular is a perfect poem for public performance, and not just because it sounds amazing. Brown celebrates the cross-generational resilience of African-Americans in the face of slavery, violence, and segregation, but he is also optimistic about the future: “Strong men keep a-comin’ on,/ Gittin’ stronger.” And surely, in a year as difficult as 1933, such a statement of optimism would have been a powerful thing.

1941: Muriel Rukeyser, “The Book of the Dead”

“The Book of the Dead” is the final section of Rukeyser’s long poem of the same name, which appeared in 1938, and combines poetry, interviews, and documentary research to tell the story of the hundreds of workers who died of silicosis as a result of shoddy safety practices at a West Virginia mining operation. Of all the poems I’ve mentioned, this is probably the least likely ever to be allowed to be read at an official American political ceremony, not only because of its topic, but also because of Rukeyser’s politics, which were well to the left of Roosevelt.

But that said, the individual poem “The Book of the Dead,” which is a much more traditional lyric poem than most of the rest of the book, has long struck me as one of the great poems about what America is, and what it could be. Rukeyser writes the poem in Dante-echoing tercets, which is fitting for a book about workers descending into an industrial hell. But within that form Rukeyser crafts a sprawling Whitmanic travelogue through the American countryside. Indeed, much of the poem is very pretty, though Rukeyser avoids Whtiman’s tendency to float up from the soil to the ether, and instead challenges the reader to support the workers crushed by their nation’s quest for progress. Near the end, she implores us to “Carry abroad the urgent need, the scene,/ to photograph and to extend the voice,/ to speak this meaning.” 

1957: Frank O’Hara, “A Step Away from Them”

If I just describe what this poem is about, you’ll wonder why I chose it for such an august occasion. The speaker wanders through midtown Manhattan, checks out some construction workers, contemplates lunch, window shops, looks at billboards, thinks about movie stars, eats a burger, and remembers a few of his recently deceased friends (one of whom is Jackson Pollock). All of this unfolds over a couple pages of loose, chatty, enjambment-propelled free verse. O’Hara conveys the energy of a pleasant nothing of a day, but like all great art that alchemically captures something so ephemeral, it also feels poignant. Perhaps it feels especially poignant nowadays, when the pleasures of strolling aimlessly through a crowd are denied us.

Whatever else America is, it’s definitely Times Square and cheeseburgers and getting lost in the bustle. Inaugural poems needn’t all be stuffy; we’re not British, after all. And so we’ll let O’Hara, poet laureate of the everyday, take the hypothetical stage.

1965: Robert Hayden, “Frederick Douglass”

An inaugural poem for 1965 surely should have celebrated the achievements of the Civil Rights movement. Hayden’s poem about Douglass, which had first appeared in The Atlantic all the way back in 1947, packs celebration, prophecy, and challenge into a mere fourteen lines. Hayden imagines a day when freedom “is finally ours,” when it will be as instinctive as “brain matter, systole, diastole,/ reflex action,” and become something more than “the gaudy mumbo-jumbo of politicians.” When that day comes, we will finally be worthy of being from the same nation as Frederick Douglass, “this former slave, this Negro/ beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world/ where none is lonely, none hunted.” 

I should stop quoting it and you should just go read it. Recited at a presidential inauguration, Hayden’s poem would elevate the occasion rather than the other way around. 

1973: Jay Wright, “The Homecoming Singer”

It’s safe to say that no poet would ever be invited to Washington to “respond” to the President, but since this exercise is entirely speculative, I’m going to imagine Jay Wright reading at Richard Nixon’s second inauguration. Wright’s 1971 poem “The Homecoming Singer” is initially full of energy, as the speaker travels across a Nashville “livid with lights,/ as if the weight of all the people/ shooting down her arteries had inflamed them.” But the poem gets quieter and more contemplative until eventually concluding with the speaker in a dream where he hears a woman sing a sad, operatic song that “brings up the Carolina calls,/ the waterboy, the railroad cutter, the jailed,/ the condemned, all that had been forgotten/ on this night of homecomings, all/ that had been misplaced in those livid arteries.” 

In the middle of the Nixon era, Wright dreamt of a song for those who are actually silenced, actually forsaken; not a silent majority but a silenced reality. In all of its sadness and anger, Wright’s poem is also a meditation on what “coming home” could mean for those swept aside, or for the poem’s lonely speaker, or for a nation where displacement is a way of life. It is, in a sense, a poem about the realities that are hidden by traditions, which in a roundabout way would make it perfect for the occasion.