On the 8th day of April in the year 1341, Moon, Mars, and Mercury are conjunct in Sagittarius with Venus in Scorpio, Jupiter in Pisces, and Saturn in Aquarius. You are a celebrated 37-year-old Italian poet, famous for your epic Africa, which tells of a Roman victory over the invading Carthaginian general Hannibal during the Second Punic War (218-201 BC). Now, with Europe poised to emerge from the Dark Ages into the light of rebirth, two senators named Giordano Orsini and Orso dell’Anguillara prepare to recognize you on the holy grounds of the Capitolium as the first poet laureate named since classical antiquity (1). It has been 20 years since the death of Dante Alighieri in 1321, and although Sandro Botticelli’s 1495 portrait will depict him wearing a laurel crown, the author of the Divine Comedy never received the honor that you—Francesco Petrarch—will receive on this day. As you climb that hill, do you wonder at the forces now conspiring to bestow power upon your head, or do you passively accept it even as speculation stirs? Was Dante overlooked for his defense of the vernacular? What are the ties binding the Latin language to the Italian state? Is the artistic integrity of a work diminished if it gets used as propaganda?

Cut to the present.

The shadow of Renaissance humanism darkens the sky of the 21st century, dictating our terms of discourse around the moral function of art and rhetorical learning as a principle of civic education. Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio each left their mark and legacy, so perhaps it makes no difference that Petrarch alone received official honors. Yet because the tradition of naming a poet laureate continues in both America and the United Kingdom, I am spending some free time at the start of this election year to reflect on some implications resulting from the existence of such an office. Given its status as a world ruler, the U.S. government will use any means it can—including poetry—to promote an ideology of freedom and democracy across the globe. But because the form, unlike prose, is open to interpretation, institutional power struggles to control messages encoded in state sanctioned poems. Still, poetry can heal divisions of society and the self, so the nonpartisan energy of hope and love lays the foundation for authentic literary production despite cynical objections to the contrary.

The custom of crowning with laurel leaves is rooted in an Ancient Greek myth. Cupid is angry with Daphne, so he curses Apollo to lust after her and chase her through the forest, but right before she is kissed, Daphne prays to her father Peneus—a river god—who transforms her into a laurel tree to preserve her purity (2). Thus, Apollo comes to love the laurel tree, and wreaths of its leaves are awarded to victors in contests of strength and intelligence, including poetry.

English poets as early as Bernard André (1450-1522) were called laureates unofficially, but it wasn’t until John Dryden (1631-1700) that Poet Laureate in England became a royal office. Today that office is held by Simon Armitage (b. 1963), who will serve 10 years from 2019 to 2029. He composed his poem, “An Unexpected Guest,” on 5 May 2023 in an official capacity for the coronation of King Charles III (3). Its 53 lines turn around the image of a house sparrow—whether real or imagined is unclear—flitting through the eaves of Westminster Abbey during the coronation ceremony. Passer domesticus can be found in most parts of the world, and its wide distribution across the planet makes it a symbol of commonness. As such, the bird symbolizes the unexpected guest of the title, a common country woman who has only “been to the capital twice” (line 3) and who “adorned the day with ordinariness” (line 49). As the central character, her awe-filled reverence for the high pageantry reflects the sentiment of many Britons and Anglophiles (anti-royalists excluded), and one gets the feeling that her luck at receiving an embossed, gilded invitation is practically beyond belief. On arriving, she takes her place with “ambulance drivers / and nurses and carers and charity workers,” (lines 13-14), the proletarian witnesses who might later attest to God’s presence in the “[...] golden and sacred things going on, / glimpses of crimson, flashes of jewels” (lines 25-6). She is hypnotized by the ritual and gives herself over to the patriotic, religious flow of time. Excerpts from the diary of Samuel Pepys reinforce Charles’ claim to the throne and remind readers of the monarchy’s long history. The coronation ends, the commoners leave, including the woman in the “coral pink hat” (line 45) fashioning herself after the late Queen Elizabeth II. That night, thinking back, she remembers, “[...] the house sparrow, / she thought she’d seen in the abbey roof / arcing from eave to eave, beyond and above” (lines 51-53). The image is strikingly weird. Sparrows are common outdoors but not inside a building. The context makes the bird noteworthy. The same is implicitly true of the woman. She returns to a normal life of obscurity, but the king’s very being changes the nature of reality, infusing it with majesty. His mere presence can influence people to believe something that isn’t true. That is the meaning of power. Armitage’s poem finds peace and healing without becoming credulous. He sees the chasm separating commoners from their rulers but resists cynicism by diverting attention to a small oddity—a detail others missed—and his quiet act of noticing is proof that he isn’t fully persuaded by the unfolding spectacle.

In the U.S., the poet laureate is not often called to compose in this manner. In fact, there have only been six such inaugural poems, and none are written by a poet laureate:

1.) Robert Frost, “The Gift Outright” (1961)—John F. Kennedy

2.) Maya Angelou, “On the Pulse of Morning” (1993)—Bill Clinton

3.) Miller Williams, “Of History and Hope” (1997)—Bill Clinton

4.) Elizabeth Alexander, “Praise Song for the Day” (2009)—Barack Obama

5.) Richard Blanco, “One Today” (2013)—Barack Obama

6.) Amanda Gorman, “The Hill We Climb” (2021)—Joe Biden

Frost wasn’t a poet laureate. He was Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1958-59, and the name didn’t change until 1985 under the impetus of Spark Matsunaga, a Democratic senator from Hawaii who was also instrumental in the creation of the United States Institute of Peace (4). None of the others were laureates either, except Amanda Gorman, the first ever National Youth Poet Laureate. She was twenty-two years old at Biden’s inauguration, and her recitation referenced the January 6th United States Capitol attack. It is odd that laureates haven’t yet performed the function of inaugural recitation, especially given the legalese encouraging all government offices “to make use of the services of the Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry for ceremonial and other occasions of celebration” (5). But I don’t want to get sidetracked by speculation, so I consider these six as honorary laureates without discrimination.

A difficulty arises from trying to untangle the cultural and financial interests tying poetic production in the U.S. to its political apparatus. It is a long story about the CIA during the Cold War and the creation of more than 250 MFA programs awarding degrees in Poetry, Fiction, and Nonfiction. It might sound spurious except that the propaganda function of writing is right on its surface. For example, as Amy Paeth writes in State Verse Culture: “[Robert] Frost viewed poetry and the creative arts as deeply relevant to the health of U.S. democratic ideology [...] In other words, he was an active player in the cultural program developed by the Truman and Eisenhower Administrations to effectively legitimize American leadership on the world stage” (6). But is ‘legitimizing American leadership on the world stage’ unambiguously a good thing? Sure, it’s good for America, but what if we are isolated on an issue with global implications? What if scientists are right about the impending climate disaster? In that case, legitimizing American leadership comes with serious consequences for the environment. The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) in 1965 was only the beginning. Consider that the 1949 Bollingen Prize went to Ezra Pound for The Pisan Cantos, causing a scandal because he was then under indictment for treason for supporting Mussolini. It was so controversial that the Library of Congress transferred administration of the award to Yale University. Anyway, it is messy, and all this information about 20th century poetry might seem obscure, confusing, or irrelevant when presented out of context, so let’s look at a particularly important text.

Maya Angelou recited her poem, “On the Pulse of Morning,” on January 20, 1993, at the first inauguration of President Bill Clinton (7). The poem of 107 lines doesn’t rely on Angelou herself as speaker, as it gives voice to elements of nature: “A Rock, A River, A Tree” (line 1). The rock cries, the river sings, and the tree speaks words carrying an anti-war message to Clinton and other Americans, but they stop short of a direct warning about the karmic repercussions of such militarism. Fortunately, we have Dr. Martin Luther King to fill in the gaps. Remember a theme recurring several times in his book, Strength to Love: “History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate” (9). For the sake self-preservation, one should eschew violent retaliation. Too often are anti-war messages dismissed as bleeding heart liberalism. It is time to wake up and see that aggression—whether you believe in Just War Theory or not—always comes home to roost. For example, I fear the Islamic world’s response to 108 days of war killing more than 25,000 Palestinians in Gaza (10). But King was never invited to speak at a presidential inauguration, and it is appropriate for Angelou to toe the line. By speaking with the voice of a crying rock, she delivered a timely message to Clinton and other Americans, who have “[…] lain too long / Face down in ignorance. / Your mouths spilling words / Armed for slaughter” (lines 17-20). In another section, the river sings, “I call you to my riverside, / If you will study war no more” (lines 32-33). Criticisms of the military-industrial complex are apparently permissible in a poem. Poetry encodes multiple meanings. Interpretations get smuggled in. The tree speaks in the third section with oblique references to the trail of tears (“Cherokee Nation, who rested with me, then / Forced on bloody feet,” [lines 58-59]) and the Atlantic slave trade (“You the Ashanti, the Yoruba, the Kru, bought, / Sold, stolen, arriving on the nightmare / Praying for a dream” [lines 64-66]), and the main idea: “History, despite its wrenching pain / Cannot be unlived, but if faced / With courage, need not be lived again” (lines 74-76). It is a colorful restatement of Santayana’s cliché that those who do not learn history are bound to repeat it. My favorite line is 92, “The horizon leans forward,” which is a mind-bender, and the final lines say, “With hope— / Good morning” (lines 106-107). What does it amount to? Still hope, clearly. Despite certain uncomfortable facts that Angelou insistently recalls in her verse, she stays rooted in the present with cognitive flexibility and openness to the possibilities of a new day. This is her power, the ability to encode facts about history that many would like to forget. She seizes the opportunity to do so in a public forum, and her words are stirring, so you can imagine even staunch conservatives being moved to re-think their deeply held patriotic convictions about the nobility of the American cause. It works because she resists despair. We must resist despair, for the best poets give hope, a more persuasive tool than purely rational argument.

Here is the bottom line. Armitage is more class conscious than Angelou, but Angelou is more race conscious than Armitage. Both wrote for a specific occasion, for an individual coming into power. But Angelou—perhaps because the U.S. has been the pre-eminent world power since the end of WWII with the UK filling a junior partner role—is more direct in her criticism of the war machine. Despite the critique of power one might read, the celebratory function is preserved intact, yet the poetic form with its multiple interpretations muddying the water, both texts create intentional ambiguity. The guiding principle of ineradicable hope—in the monarchy, in democracy, in humanity—lights a path forward through the corruption of society. I find it refreshing to read such optimism amidst the morass of cynical political commentary surrounding the ongoing Republican primary and the 2024 election. There are those who object to any message other than cynical, “enlightened” desperation, but cynicism itself has become a dominant mode of ideological propagation (see Slavoj Žižek’s The Sublime Object of Ideology), so I am skeptical of anyone who is too eager to embrace despair and doomerism.

Joseph Epstein is one such cynical commentator, whose article in the September 2004 issue of Poetry makes the argument that any self-respecting poet who is offered the laureateship would “turn it down, preferably in a wittily obstreperous way” (11). Near the beginning of his curmudgeonly article, he admits he has published “a single poem,” and that he would “like to be asked to be poet laureate of the United States so that I could refuse it.” The self-pity and pretension on display are astonishing, and I wonder if there are any readers of Poetry who take this kind of thing seriously. I don’t want to get bogged down, but there is one point worth challenging directly. On page 372, he states, “Somehow poetry and politics are never rightly conjoined,” which is not only a dangerous idea (apologies to Oscar Wilde) but also happens to be demonstrably false. In fact, I don’t see any possibility of dis-joining poetry and politics. Literature always has a political function, and if you think it doesn’t, then that simply means it is working on you without your knowledge. There is no such thing as art for art’s sake, despite conservative arguments that cultural productions are separate from the political apparatus controlling society. To me, these arguments sound like the Wizard of Oz saying, “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!” even though Dorothy has already seen through the illusion. One may look behind the curtain without sacrificing their appreciation for a beautiful poem.

Like the speaker of Francesco Petrarch’s “Sonnet 227” longing for Laura, his love (“now I seem to find her, now I realize / she’s far away, now I’m comforted, now despair, / now longing for her, now truly seeing her”), you never know what the future has in store.