The Gift Outright

I have some good news for Amanda Gorman: Americans don’t murder our poets.

Gorman, who embarked on her splendid career as a poet of the oppressed while studying at a $50,000-a-year private school in Santa Monica, Calif., and then carried the work on to Harvard with the financial support of the Milken Family Foundation, was named the nation’s first “youth poet laureate,” and read a poem, “The Hill We Climb,” at Joe Biden’s presidential inauguration.

It is not a very good poem, but Americans are not a very poetic people.

Gorman writes in the New York Times (as all the downtrodden do) that she almost declined the invitation to recite her work at the inauguration, fearing for her physical safety. Friends advised her to buy a bulletproof vest. “My mom had us crouch in our living room so that she could practice shielding my body from bullets,” she writes. “A loved one warned me to ‘be ready to die.’”

In the event, nothing happened.

That’s how it usually goes.

No doubt there were more than a few racist maniacs who would have liked to have killed Barack Obama at his inauguration or as soon thereafter as they could, and two minor plots against him were, in fact, uncovered. The Denver plot was so half-assed that the feds couldn’t even charge the conspirators with any conspiracy against the president (the narcotics charges they did hand down perhaps will give you an idea of whom they were dealing with), and the Tennessee plot, which was quite fantastical (they planned to murder 88 African Americans before going after the president, 88 being a hallmark number in white-power numerology) never progressed past the first step, which was to rob a firearms dealer in order to arm themselves.

The last serious plot to kill an American president seems to have been Saddam Hussein’s attempt to murder George H. W. Bush in Kuwait in 1993. Before that, there was deranged cinephile John Hinckley Jr.’s shooting of Ronald Reagan in 1981, and two women — leftist radical Sara Jane Moore and Squeaky Fromme, a champagne hippie of the Mansonite variety from Santa Monica — attempted to murder Gerald Ford in separate incidents only a few weeks apart in 1975. The communist Lee Harvey Oswald killed John Kennedy, and the anarchist Leon Czolgosz assassinated William McKinley. A man driven mad by grief shot Teddy Roosevelt, and Roosevelt, having a great talent for self-promotion, stopped the crowd from lynching his would-be assassin and then finished his speech, observing: “It takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose!” The reputation of the .38 Special never quite recovered, but Roosevelt’s soared.

And then there was John Wilkes Booth, the American Judas.

The man who shot Teddy Roosevelt was himself a poet. But we’ve never seen the assassination of a poet laureate. Robert Penn Warren and Robert Frost both died of cancer, Robert Lowell suffered a heart attack in a New York City taxi, Robert Hayden died of heart failure, William Carlos Williams died of a stroke. Randall Jarrell stepped in front of a car on U.S. Route 15-501, which the examiner called an accident but which Lowell judged to be a suicide. Not an assassination in the bunch.

We hardly bother with the poets at all.

Maya Angelou, who lived to be 86 and now appears on our currency, never served as poet laureate, but she did read at Bill Clinton’s inauguration, the first poet to perform at an inauguration since Robert Frost. Her poem wasn’t very good, and neither was Frost’s, “The Gift Outright,” though one of its lines has stuck in the national mind: “The land was ours before we were the land’s.” Our land: That is the sort of sentiment that would get you kicked out of a poetry-MFA program in our time — practically fascist, it might as well be Kipling.

If Americans do not murder our poets, it is not that we want for savagery. We saw an unusual display of political violence on January 6, 2021, two weeks before Gorman was to recite her poem, and so it is understandable that she was frightened. These are frightening times. But, mostly, Americans are the sort of people whose barbarism tops out at looting Amazon packages off freight trains passing through California, “The Great Train Robbery” without the daring or the panache. We have violence in our hearts, but not much poetry: At the moment, Gorman occupies three out of the top twenty spots on the Amazon bestseller list for poetry, including the top spot, ten places ahead of Homer and four spots up from Dr. Seuss.

Some other countries take their poets more seriously. The Nazis murdered poets when they could get them, and in Spain the Nationalists made disappearing Federico García Lorca a priority. (His body has never been found.) In the Soviet Union, 13 Jewish intellectuals, including half a dozen Yiddish-language writers, were executed in the Lubyanka on the “Night of the Murdered Poets.” The victims no doubt all detested capitalism, but they probably would have preferred some Milken Foundation scholarships to what they got from their fellow utopians in the end.

We don’t murder our poets. Mostly, we ignore them. And then, we forget them. St. Louis today produces considerable quantities of dog food and gravel, but it also produced T. S. Eliot, not that you’d know it from visiting the city. And though I am happy to have Amanda Gorman read her work for Joe Biden’s inauguration, it is the ghost of T. S. Eliot who should be reciting at our inaugurations, because he understood “The Difficulties of a Statesman”

What shall I cry?

We demand a committee, a representative committee, a committee of investigation

and also offered some excellent advice to the ephebic politician:

Resign Resign Resign.

Her fears of political violence notwithstanding, the only shot heard during Amanda Gorman’s performance was her book shooting to the top spot on the USA Today bestseller list, the first time a book of poetry had appeared in that position — No. 1 with a bullet, as they used to say on the radio. Poets are not usually reporters, but one might wonder a little about whether Gorman has seen very much of the country she writes about, whether she understands, among other things, how anxious its most powerful men and women are to see talented young people such as herself succeed. It is a different story than the one she imagines. She did not end up at Harvard by accident — Michael Milken has always had an eye for a good investment. She did not end up at the inauguration or on the best-seller list by accident, either. What threatens poets such as her is not bullets or oppression or hatred but success, too much familiarity with power and status, and too much ease with them. The danger is not that she gets gunned down on the mean streets of Cambridge, Mass., in front of Senator Warren’s house, but that she gets a MacArthur grant and a visiting professorship, spends her time writing insipid comic books, or joins the board of Facebook.

That is how Americans dispose of our poets, when we notice them at all.