Amanda Gorman Shines as the Sixth, and Youngest, U.S. Inaugural Poet 

During the inaugural ceremony in Washington D.C. last month, twenty-two year old Amanda Gorman delivered her poem “The Hill We Climb” just days after the deadly insurrection there. Describing herself as “a skinny black girl, descended from slaves, and raised by a single mother,” her poem aspires to “envision a way in which our country can still come together and still heal,” she said in an article by Alexandra Alter in the New York Times. Gorman, a recent Harvard graduate, was raised in Los Angeles where she sang in the youth choir and recited her poetry at St. Brigid Catholic Church in South Central L.A. “Í think a lot of times in cultures we think of the ways we can cleanse ourselves with water. I think of the ways we can cleanse ourselves with words, meaning that the poem was an opportunity to kind of resanctify, repurify, and reclaim, not just the Capitol Building, but American democracy and what it stands for,” she told Trevor Noah of the Daily Show. Inspiring and polished, Gorman’s performance was just about as good as it gets, at any age.

The focus on healing is shared by Richard Blanco, an openly gay Latino, who read his poem “One Today” at President Barack Obama’s second inaugural in 2013. Speaking to NBC’s Sandra Tulley, he suggested that “Poetry uses language to make us feel and think in new ways. That’s how it can help heal us — by asking questions we aren’t asking of ourselves and others, and by changing the conversation, the rhetoric, the discourse, so that we can see beyond the abstract language of sociopolitical jargon and arrive at greater truths,” said Blanco, who aims to “build bridges of empathy” with his poetry.

Maya Angelou was already a best-selling author with her candid memoir, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” when she served as inaugural poet at the swearing in of President Bill Clinton in 1993.  Her recitation of “On the Pulse of Morning,” with its themes of inclusion and responsibility, was stirringly theatrical, calling on her training as an actor and speaker, and echoing the oral tradition of African Americans such as Martin Luther King, Jr. and Frederick Douglas. At least one critic has suggested that Angelou’s greatness is attributable to that poem, but her enduring message may be in her life as much as in those words, in her role as a black woman writer, teacher, activist, and humanitarian.

The tradition of the inaugural poem is relatively recent in U.S. history. In 1961, President John F. Kennedy was the first of four presidents to select a poet to compose and read an original poem for the inauguration. His choice of Robert Frost resulted in one of the most memorable images from that time. Standing at the podium, sunlight reflecting off his untamed white hair and the snow on the ground, Frost recited his poem, “The Gift Outright” — completely from memory. But that wasn’t the poem he’d planned on delivering. Glare from the snow prevented him from reading his original text, “Dedication, For John Kennedy His Inauguration,” composed for the occasion. Both works can be found in “The Poetry of Robert Frost” (Holt, Rhinehart, & Winston, 1969). More recently, Miller Williams and Elizabeth Alexander have also served with distinction as inaugural poets for the second terms of Clinton and Obama. For more on this, see “Inaugural Poems in History,” www.poets.org.