Lots of poets and literary types have been dismissive on social media about the poem Amanda Gorman wrote for the Democratic National Convention in the States. You can read the text of her poem here (you need to scroll down), but this is a piece of writing designed to be heard, so it’s probably better to watch or listen to her performance of it:
I didn’t love Gorman’s poem — and I am certainly not its target audience — but I don’t think it’s terrible, and in lots of ways it seemed well suited to its occasion. It certainly seems silly to suggest that it’s not a poem at all (as some people have). It’s no more clichéd than a lot of published poems I see in top journals and winning prizes, even if the clichés it is dealing in — and the rhetorical tradition on which it draws — are quite different. This made me wonder what was so alienating or annoying about Gorman’s piece for many discerning readers of poetry, including many who are vastly more tolerant than me of the sort of prosy-introspection-with-a-couple-of-OK-metaphors that often passes for a prize-winning contemporary poem?
I think the most obvious point is that it is an occasional poem, and a public one: a piece written for a particular audience at a particular event, with a particular rhetorical aim in mind, and (of necessity) designed to be followed and appreciated live, during the course of a single performance. (Actually, of course, almost all contemporary English poetry is, in practice, also written for a highly specific audience, indeed one vastly tinier than the delegates at the Democratic National Convention, but the majority of contemporary poems are not written primarily for performance, and many indeed rely partly on visual features which cannot be appreciated aurally.)
Gorman’s poem is also unlike most contemporary poetry because it is not written in the familiar first-person often described (a bit oddly, from a classicist’s point of view) as the “lyric voice”. It’s not dealing with the sensitive probing of a personal experience. Gorman speaks as the vates, the poet-prophet, the poet who speaks both for and to the people. (The ‘people’, in this case, being primarily Democrats.) It is declarative rather than exploratory, and indeed this point was the core of the criticism from one of the responses I found most interesting. Katie Dozier on Twitter, who tweets indefatigably and always thoughtfully about contemporary poetry, remarked:
(If you want to read the full thread of this conversation, it’s here.)
I found this very striking because if a declarative poem cannot be good that rules out an awful lot, including (in practice) many of the most read poems at any historical period, including hymns and other types of secular praise as well as that most durably popular (if unfashionable) category of stirring, moralising verse. Kipling’s ‘If —’ is declarative, but so is Dylan Thomas’ ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’ or Campion’s ‘The man of life upright’. Historically I suspect the vast majority of poems are versifications of a set message of one kind or another, and the beauty and satisfaction of the best of them derives in large part from recognition and agreement, rather than a sense of discovery; from hearing, as Pope put it, ‘What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed’.
The poems by Kipling and Thomas and Campion are all in conventional lyric metrical forms, which Gorman’s is not. But her poem, with its marked cadences, repetitions, parallelism and internal rhymes, is clearly distinguished from ordinary prose and indeed is much further removed from regular prose than most prose poems and a great deal of free verse. Some of the poem’s formal features might remind us of Walt Whitman and the particularly American tradition of free verse in imitation of him. Combined with Gorman’s slow and incantatory delivery the most obvious comparison for me, though, is to a certain style of Christian preaching on scripture. Many of the rhetorical features of this style derive ultimately from the Bible (mainly the Hebrew Bible) and its translations. (I understand that the style owes a lot as well to the traditions of “slam” poetry, which I don’t know, and perhaps ultimately these traditions have shared roots.) In any case, its strong cadences, highly stylised phrases and frequent repetition make it easy to follow even in a single “live” reading, and many audience members obviously found it moving.
The poem is also highly allusive — in a general sense, via its diction (‘perish’, ‘redeem’, ‘our kingdom come’), to a wide range of scriptural and religious sources describing the hope of salvation, and more specifically to various more recent texts. ‘The audacity of hope’, for instance, is the title of a book by Barack Obama, though the phrase was itself adapted from a sermon. The phrase ‘perish from this earth’ alludes to the Gettysburg addres (‘and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth’), but it is also Biblical — we find it in Jeremiah 10:11 (of pagan gods, in contrast to the true God) and the New Testament repeatedly offers the hope that those who believe in Christ will not perish. Even the ‘race’ we face in line 3 — that is, the election itself — echoes the New Testament (2 Timothy 4:7: ‘I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith’). The final sequence, with its emphasis upon personal virtue, sounds almost more like a poem about the Christian hope of heaven (here glossed as “the American Dream”) than it does a call for action on earth:
We redeem this sacred scene, ready for our journey from it.
Together, we must birth this early republic
And achieve an unearthly summit.
Let us not just believe in the American Dream.
Let us be worthy of it.
The poem is unquestionably a religious text, and I suppose what most bothers many people is its combination of religious language and political partisanship. (Several Twitter critics described it as propaganda.) Such a combination is central, of course, to the traditional role of the poet laureate and is not really different in kind from, say, Jonson’s masques for James I or those endless passages of late first-century BC Latin in praise of Augustus, ranging from the genuinely stirring and strange (Horace, Odes 1.2), to the grandly moving (the start of Georgics 3) to the tedious and formulaic (so many bits of Propertius). I think the best first-century parallel, though, is Horace’s Carmen Saeculare, the only bit of Augustan Latin we know was certainly written for a performance (at the Saecular Games of 17 BC), and which marked Horace’s elevation to laureate status. (Virgil had died in 19 BC.)
The carmen saeculare is a hymn addressed to Apollo and Diana, in praise of Augustus and his achievements, and performed by a mixed chorus of boys and girls. The two divinities appear together three times, at the start, middle and end of the hymn. (You can read the Latin here, and a translation here.) Whereas Gorman’s poem ends by stating that ‘we redeem this sacred scene, ready for our journey from it’, Horace’s poem begins by locating itself in a ‘sacred time’ (tempore sacro, 4).
The poem implicitly links Augustus’ domestic rule and foreign conquests with the power and protection of these gods, just as Gorman’s poem associates the political aspirations of the American Democratic party with scriptural language of hope amid suffering, the possibility of redemption, and the promise of salvation. It is written in a simpler style than most of Horace’s lyric verse, and critics have struggled (despite their best efforts) to find much that could be described as ambiguous or ironic in its combination of political and religious praise.
Modern classicists tend to steer clear of Horace’s most panegyric verse, often with an air of slight embarrassment. But in earlier period, poets have time and again turned to the model of the carmen for their own politico-religious purposes.1 Here, for instance, is Phineas Fletcher rather cleverly and delicately using the twin figures of Apollo and Diana to combine a lament for the death of Elizabeth I with a celebration of the accession of James I in 1603:
Quae, sicut rutilis Cynthia curribus,
Lucebat solio splendida patrio,
Sub laetho, (hei mihi laetho
Fas tantum scelus est?) iacet.Qui, sicut Clarius nube deus nigra,
Occultus tenebris delituit suis:
Iam nuper Boreali
Sol nobis oritur plaga.She who, like Cynthia glowing in her chariot,
Shone radiantly in her father’s throne,
Now lies (alas! is such
An outrage possible?) in death.He who, like the Clarian god [= Apollo] in his black cloud,
Lay hidden in shadow:
Now rises for us as
The sun on the Northern shore.2
There are good 20th-century (and older) reasons why the sophisticated Western critic might feel uncomfortable with such outright and religiously-mediated praise of a political movement, but it is certainly fascinating to see it done in a modern context.
Maybe the most interesting thing about Gorman’s poem on the day though, was how it began. In her performance, the poem begins with the arresting phrase ‘We gather at this hollow place’. This opening has come in for quite a lot of mockery online, because it seems — from the various published transcripts — that she meant to say the more obvious ‘hallowed’, and mispoke in the moment. Her mistake, assuming it was one, was rather Shakespearean — hallow and hollow are interchangeable spellings in Shakespeare, and of course an auditorium is, literally, a hollow place — like the ‘wooden O’ of the Elizabethan theatre described in the preface to Henry V. (Initially, I thought she was alluding intentionally to the very striking description by Olaudah Equiano of the interior of a slave ship as a ‘hollow place’, though the published transcripts would suggest this is not the case.3)
But the slip, or ambiguity, interested me also because it seems to expose a rhetorical difficulty about the poem as a whole. Depending as it does so strongly upon a scripturally-inflected hope of redemption or salvation, the rhetorical structure of the poem implies a present context of suffering, division or failure — the long, repeated Biblical story of the separations caused by human disobedience, irreverence and death; by exile, slavery, worship of alien gods; by persecution and crucifixion. The slough of despond; this vale of tears — this hollow place.
The great hope of redemption and salvation requires for its power present sin or at least great difficulty — something to be redeemed and saved from. Contextually, this might seem a bit awkward, since after all the Democrats already hold the Presidency, and have done for nearly four years. It comes quite close to implying that the Biden Presidency had become something of a Slough of Despond for the good Democratic Pilgrim. (Surely true, if perhaps a bit on the nose.) I suppose the intended interpretation is that the suffering to be endured, the ‘test’, is that of the electoral season itself and the painful possibility of a Republican victory, but this element of ambiguity highlights the religious quality of the message and echoes liturgical practice: liturgy of all types does generally move from acknowledging failure, sin and struggle to a renewed declaration of faith and hope. As Horace puts it at the end of his hymn:
Haec Iovem sentire deosque cunctos
spem bonam certamque domum reporto,
doctus et Phoebi chorus et Dianae
dicere laudes.
(73-6)
That this [that Rome will continue to prosper and expand] is how Jove and all the gods feel
Is the good and sure hope I bring back home,
Having been taught, as a chorus, to sing the praises
Of Obama and of Kamala.4
John Talbot has an excellent essay on Sisson, Marvell and the carmen saeculare in our book C. H. Sisson Reconsidered (Palgrave, 2023). C. H. Sisson’s version of the carmen is the only really interesting modern translation of which I’m aware.
This is the beginning of a six-stanza poem published in Threno-Thriambeuticon (1603), while Fletcher was a student at King’s College, Cambridge. The poem is in alcaics. The ‘Northern shore’ alludes to the fact that James I was already James VI of Scotland, and came down from Scotland for the coronation. A poem from 1554 makes similar use of the twin deities of the carmen saeculare to celebrate the marriage of Mary I and Philip of Spain.
Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Written by Himself
(London, 1789; reprint, ed. Robert J. Allison, Boston: Bedford, 1995), p. 55. The young Olaudah recalls asking whether the owners of the ship had no country of their own, but lived in ‘this hollow place’.
Not a perfectly literal translation.
This is a beautiful essay, full of insights about the history of poetry, and a really valiant attempt to defend Gorman's poem, but I'm afraid I remain unconvinced! I think the problem is that her poem's intertexts are very clearly American political speeches, not poetry or literature. You can hear Obama, you can hear Martin Luther King, you can hear the pledge of allegiance, you can hear religiously-inflected DNC speeches, and maybe even a couple of sermons. But it has very little relationship to any verse tradition. That's very different from even prosy contemporary poems (which I'm not a fan of either), not to mention earlier political verse. And I can see why people find it off-putting: it feels like another aspect of the complete departure of the arts from public life in the US.
I find the delivery as Martin Luther King crossed with Rupi Kaur! From the former, a preaching* style drawing on the black American churches, the religious overtones, the sense of the great arc of justice bending towards an imminent secular new Jerusalem. From the latter, the highly dramatised use of the hands while speaking, the snappy dressing, the half-epigrams half-cliches (epicliches?) that I think people react against.
Like you, I'm not the target audience and, similarly, I neither love it nor am irritated by it.
*preaching here as literally preaching, not with negative moralising connotations