We recently celebrated World Poetry Day, which gives poets, both public and private, a day in the sun. It also renews old conversations about why poetry might be important and whether all poems should rhyme.
The first question gained some impetus when Amanda Gorman, the United States Youth Poetry Laureate read her poem ‘The Hill we Climb’ at the inauguration of President Biden. Not only was she young, confident, alive and dressed by Prada, but both the poem itself and the reading of it took the Inauguration to new depth. ‘The Hill we Climb’ was a personal imagining of the urgency, the cost and the importance of unifying the nation. It was Amanda’s dream, but the craft with which she wrote and spoke it made it a universal dream. It invited its hearers to the inauguration not only as a political event but as a human event.
Poetry can do that. Good poems catch the human depth of all our encounters: with ourselves, with the people we love, the world around us, with politics, science and all else. They do it by inviting their writers to explore the depths of their own gifts, and especially the gift of words, of rhythm and sound, of memory and of silence. Amanda Gorman’s poem is notable for its rhythm. The many rhymes, repetitions and the strong emphasis on the last word of each line are reminiscent of rap, a poetic language drawn from the Black American culture that Amanda inherited. From these she crafted her personal statement of hope in hard times spoken in the name of the nation.
'And yet the dawn is ours
before we knew it
Somehow we do it
Somehow we've weathered and witnessed
a nation that isn't broken
but simply unfinished.'
By bringing together the personal and the public the poem ensured that the meaning of the event was held in memory. That is a central business of poetry. The Iliad and La Chanson de Roland, for example, both described memorable conflicts that would now be dismissed as of no more than local interest. Of course, poems about public events do not always meet the mark — among the worst poems of British Poet Laureates have often been those to do with such national events as royal coronations or marriages. In a good poem of the genre, the writer will be deeply involved, skilful, and will describe an event of high significance. The personal and the public