Calliope, the muse of poetry, has subtly insinuated herself into the American presidential race, and may be moving back into the White House come November. Barack Obama's early poetry is being subjected to close critical analysis; the American poet Maya Angelou has thrown her stanzas into the ring in support of Hillary Clinton; and John McCain has revealed an unexpected taste for uplifting 19th-century English verse.
Obama's poetry, as evidenced by two poems he wrote for a college magazine at the age of 19, is actually surprisingly good. Indeed, he may be the best amateur poet to run for president since Abraham Lincoln, which is saying quite a lot.
Consider, for example, the opening lines of the Obama poem entitled Pop, about the grandfather with whom he lived for much of his childhood.
“Sitting in his seat, a seat broad and broken/ In, sprinkled with ashes,/ Pop switches channels, takes another/ Shot of Seagrams, neat, and asks/ What to do with me, a green young man/ Who fails to consider the/ Flim and flam of the world, since/ Things have been easy for me.”
OK, it is not exactly Walt Whitman, but it reveals a lyrical sensibility and a refreshing awareness of the power of words. No less a critic than Professor Harold Bloom of Yale, America's doyen of English literature, has said of Obama's poetry that “it shows a kind of humane and sad wit. There is a mind there.” Maya Angelou, who performed her poem On the Pulse of the Morning at Bill Clinton's inauguration in 1993, has put her poetry at the service of the next Clinton candidate, with a four-line defence of Hillary.
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“You may write me down in history/ With your bitter, twisted lies/ You may tread me in the very dirt/ But still, like dust, I'll rise.”
Not to be outdone, the Republican front-runner John McCain, in his victory speech after the South Carolina primary, invoked the Victorian poem Invictus, by William Ernest Henley: “We are the captain of our fate,” he said, echoing Henley's “I am the master of my fate/ I am the captain of my soul”.
Invictus was written from a hospital bed in 1875, after Henley's foot had been amputated because of a tubercular infection of the bone (the one-legged Henley would become a model for Long John Silver). McCain memorised the poem at school, and its exhortation to keep fighting, “bloody but unbow'd”, has a peculiar resonance for the battle-scarred 71-year-old Vietnam veteran: “And yet the menace of the years/ Find, and shall find me, unafraid.”
In Britain, politics and poetry do not mix - Clement Attlee, Enoch Powell, and David Owen all wrote poetry, to little acclaim, and some derision - but in the US there is a long, if patchy, tradition of presidential poetry. George Washington himself wrote a somewhat clunky teenage ode to a woman named Frances Alexa (“From your bright sparkling Eyes, I was undone...”), while Lincoln wrote excellent doggerel, as well as some thumpingly morbid stuff about death - “Thou awe-inspiring prince/ That keepst the world in fear” - but the Gettysburg Address remains one of the finest prose-poems in the language.
If Lincoln was the best presidential poet, then Jimmy Carter was arguably the worst, though he deserves some sort of prize for the least enticing poem title in literature: Why We Get Cheaper Tires from Liberia. Harry Truman always kept in his pocket a copy of Tennyson's poem Locksley Hall, handwritten on a piece of paper, and the former presidential candidate John Kerry felt moved to demonstrate his grip of poetry while on the stump: “I can do a great Prufrock,” he told The New York Times. “I can do Kipling's Gunga Din anytime you want. I'm ready.” George W. Bush, by contrast, has never felt the need to evince a knowledge of anything more poetic than Dolly Parton. Donald Rumsfeld inadvertently spoke in a sort of fractured, free-form verse, which was collected into a book, The Existential Poetry of Donald Rumsfeld: “As we know there are known knowns. But there are also unknown knowns. The ones we don't know we don't know.” But on the whole, the Bush years in power have been among the least poetic in history. “I can't do poetry,” George Bush Snr once remarked.
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Whichever candidate wins in November, poetry may be returning to the White House, although not, one hopes, to the extent that it did under Bill Clinton, who famously presented Monica Lewinsky with a copy of Whitman's Leaves of Grass.
A poetic sensibility may not be the best criterion by which to judge a potential president, yet it is also true that some of America's greatest leaders have been those with the most poetry in their souls. In this respect, Mr Obama plainly leads the field. When writing about his early use of drugs, for example, he uses words to illuminate a truth, in the most lyrical way, rather than obscure it. Marijuana, he said, was “something that could flatten out the landscape of my heart, blur the edges of my memory”.
Mr Obama has been hailed as the new JFK; and as the most poetic presidential candidate for a generation inches closer to the White House, it is worth recalling the closing lines of the poem Dedication by Robert Frost, which Kennedy commissioned for his own inauguration in 1961: “A golden age of poetry and power/ Of which this noonday's the beginning hour.”
On the other hand, as he grinds on into the next phase of a gruelling and fascinating presidential election, Mr Obama himself may feel closer in spirit to one of Rumsfeld's accidental poems: “I feel like a gerbil/ I get on that thing/ And I run like hell.”