Inauguration Day saw Amanda Gorman, the first National Youth Poet Laureate, read her poem “The Hill We Climb” to commemorate President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris being sworn into office. Gorman’s powerful vitality, presence and delivery immediately made her an internet sensation. She has already been immortalized on social media, with countless Instagram text posts circulating her most inspirational sound bites: “For there is always light,” Gorman said, “if only we’re brave enough to see it; if only we’re brave enough to be it.” Championing peace, unity and harmony, Gorman’s poem arrives at a dark moment in history when such ideals are perhaps the most difficult to find.
Over the course of 46 presidencies, there have been a mere six inaugural poems, including Gorman’s. All, in one way or another, have emphasized collective identity. Robert Frost flooded his poem, “The Gift Outright,” with inclusive words like “we”and “ours”and “ourselves.”Maya Angelou’s “On the Pulse of Morning” outlines, in broad, sweeping strokes, a shared historical trajectory from mastodons and dinosaurs to a river that invites “all” peoples to plant themselves beside its banks. “One Today” by Richard Blanco manages to find oneness everywhere: “One sun rose on us today,” the poem begins, going on to depict an America standing on one ground, illuminated by one light and living under one sky.
Gorman’s poem is no exception. In line with the “America United” theme of Biden’s inauguration, Gorman’s poem calls for togetherness and healing: “We lift our gazes not to what stands between us but what stands before us,” Gorman proclaimed. “We close the divide because we know, to put our future first, we must first put our differences aside.”
One after the other, every inaugural poem has depicted America as a myth written, rewritten and still unfolding. In her 2009 inaugural poem “Praise Song for the Day,” Elizabeth Alexander describes how with every new morning “any thing can be made, any sentence begun.” Miller Williams, in his 1997 inaugural poem “Of History and Hope,” writes of an America “memorized” through “telling the stories, singing the old songs.” Like other inaugural poems before it, “The Hill We Climb” stresses the sense of a shared story. But Gorman is perhaps the most explicit of all the inaugural poets in positioning America as a narrative. “History has its eyes on us,” she said, quoting“Hamilton” — a show whose motif perpetually repeats, “Who tells your story?” Gorman’s poem depicts the American people as finding “the power to author a new chapter.” At one point, she cites what is arguably the mythos most foundational to American culture: the Bible. “Scripture tells us to envision that everyone shall sit under their own vine and fig tree,” she says, referencing a verse often quoted (both in “Hamilton”and in real life) by George Washington, “and no one shall make them afraid.”
The America of the 18th century would have associated this verse, according to the Mount Vernon library, with immigration tolerance. However, the America of today just witnessed the waving of “Jesus Saves” posters alongside Confederate flags and swastikas at the Capitol insurrection on Jan. 6. And that’s exactly the trouble with the vague appeals to “unity” and “God” so prevalent at Biden’s inauguration, with unity in particular being the buzzword of choice since the riots. These buzzwords appeal to a shared mythology — except no one can agree on what those myths mean. Uniting the left and right through “one nation under God” is easy enough when the terms are left so murky and inoffensive that “God" can be allowed to signify diversity, inclusion and justice for some, and white Christian nationalism for others. Listening to Tim McGraw and Tyler Hubbard sing the inaugural country anthem “Undivided” might resonate at the time, but ultimately the story has paradoxically been left too open and too broad to offer any “space to place new steps of change,” in Angelou’s words.
Regardless of the political aisle, myths have power. The myth of the stolen election successfully drove the Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol. So, too, do the myths penned in the poems by our six inaugural poets, all performed at Democrat inaugurations, have the power to inspire hope. Biden, however, has more than an uphill battle ahead of him if he seeks to unify the American people under one collective story.Writing for NPR, Senior Political Editor Domenico Montanaro puts it succinctly: “The misinformation consumed by many on the right has been fed for decades through prime-time cable dressed up as straight news. Facebook memes and outfits even further on the fringe than Fox News are growing in popularity. Conspiracies are being mainstreamed. There is no good answer for unraveling that. So the country will remain sharply divided.”
The myths of unity, progressiveness and inclusivity woven throughout all six inaugural poems resound with beauty and genuine aspiration. But are these ideals on their own enough to stand up to the aggressive and very real mythologizing campaigns currently being furthered by the Republican party? In October of last year, former President Donald Trump announced his “1776 Commission,” an attempt to rewrite the American national identity through the conservative Christian lens of the founders. Made as a response to the “1619 Project” of The New York Times, his historical revisionism would have overwritten our nation’s past to align with the so-called patriotism of white conservative America. When the very history of our country is being made up for debate, such attacks warrant a greater rebuttal than reciting “unity” and singing “Amazing Grace.”
“Who were many people coming together,” wrote Williams in his inaugural poem for former President Bill Clinton, “cannot become one people falling apart.” That was almost 25 years ago. Without a common narrative, we still find ourselves falling apart. It is up to our nation’s leaders to define specifically our shared story and do their part in taking us there, so that — as Gorman says — we do not “march back to what was” but instead “to what shall be: A country that is bruised but whole, benevolent but bold, fierce and free.”
