When asked by the President-Elect John F. Kennedy to read a poem at his inauguration, Robert Frost responded with this reply: “If you can bear at your age the honor of being made president of the United States, I ought to be able at my age to bear the honor of taking some part in your inauguration. I may not be equal to it but I can accept it for my cause – the arts, poetry, now for the first time taken into the affairs of statesmen.”

However, blinded by the brilliant sunlight of that January 20^th on a day that more befit Washington, Vermont than the Capitol in D.C., the eighty-six year old poet was unable to read “Dedication,” the poem that he had written for the occasion and instead resorted to a recitation of “The Gift Outright” and the American tradition of an Inaugural Poem was born.

“The Gift Outright” was delivered from memory by a poet who in 1961 was truly American, born in San Francisco yet forever associated with New England; Frost was a child of the 19^th Century chosen to poetically bless this modern young President. When he recited “The Gift Outright” that cold morning, America still held to the American myths of the 1950s, which spoke of access, acquisition, and ascendancy available primarily to White men whose Christianity and heterosexuality was publically practiced. The “hot winds” of the 1960s that August Wilson recalls in Fences have yet to blow across America in a “turbulent, racing, dangerous, and provocative decade.”

Frost’s overt patriotic tone praises a relationship between land and White settlers worth the costs of battle and discovery to make it “ours.” References to Plymouth and Jamestown come early, and the words “possessing” and “withholding” appear throughout the poem, while his double entendre of “deed” connects ownership and war in a necessary national bargain. The American West lies “unstoried, artless, unenhanced, /Such as she was…” devoid of the stories, art, and culture that will come only with the arrival of White pioneers. Written decades before Kennedy’s Inauguration, “The Gift Outright” is more a nostalgic paean to an American past awaiting Europe’s people and their literature, art, and civilization. As Derek Walcott reflected, “The Gift Outright” sounds “more like an elegy than a benediction.” This is not to denigrate Frost who, alongside Whitman, may have best captured the Mythology of American people and places prior to the mid-Twentieth Century. Instead, we must simply and honestly acknowledge that Frost’s recitation of “The Gift Outright” demonstrates that at this historic moment of the American experience, our most celebrated poet thought to reach for the poem that he knew would best tell the American story as “we” wanted to hear it in our literature.

Now, sixty years later, Amanda Gorman comes along with “The Hill We Climb.” Gorman may be another Californian with a New England connection; she attended Harvard, and at twenty-two compared with Joe Biden’s 78 years, the age polarity of poet and President is still present but flipped, youth is on the side of the Artist.  Additionally, early in her poem Gorman introduces herself as: “…a skinny Black girl/ descended from slaves and raised by a single mother/ (who) can dream of becoming president/ only to find herself reciting for one.” Immediately, we know this Inaugural Poem will be different, as it should be

There is rhyme: “Then victory won’t lie in the blade/ But in all the bridges we’ve made/ That is the promised glade.” And there is clever and clear use of homonym: “And the norms and notions/ of what just is/ Isn’t always justice.” And she uses meaningful and artful alliteration: “To compose a country committed to all cultures, colors, characters, and conditions…” The influence of Whitman’s sound, meter, and structure, as well as his hopeful democracy, comes through as well: “That even as we grieved, we grew/ That even as we hurt, we hoped/ That even as we tired, we tried.” But Gorman’s poem is also part Hip-Hop and part theater – her hands, her voice, her presence, and even a riff on Hamilton… “For while we have our eyes on the future/ history has its eyes on us.” Importantly, Gorman uses the pronoun “we” well over fifty times in her poem as a broader, more inclusive, and more powerful plurality than Frost’s “ours.” Her “we” is a collective American community taught by Scripture to respect others in order to face the challenges of this time that currently confront all of us.

Scripture tells us to envision

that everyone shall sit under their own vine and fig tree

And no one shall make them afraid

If we’re to live up to our own time

As an Inaugural poet, Gorman appears to be more in the company of Maya Angelou, who wrote “On the Pulse of Morning” for Bill Clinton’s Inauguration in 1993, and Richard Blanco, who twenty years later consecrated Barack Obama’s second term with “One Today.

Gorman’s poem offers hope and optimism for the nation and the coming Administration as Angelou and Blanco did before her, but she resists the temptation to propose Unity (the word of the day) without exacting some accountability (another word tossed about) from America’s citizens with lines that clearly came to her after January 6^th when Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, neo-Nazis, and White Supremacists, Trump Supporters all, rushed up the steps, where she delivered her poem two weeks later, to beat Police officers, to steal documents, laptops, and furniture, and to desecrate both House and Senate in a perverse expression of “patriotism” that sought to overthrow an election for a new “Lost Cause.”

It’s because being American is more than a pride we inherit,

it’s the past we step into

and how we repair it

We’ve seen a force that would shatter our nation

rather than share it

Would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy

And this effort very nearly succeeded

Gorman’s “Hill” is clearly not Winthrop’s hill topped by a shining city constructed by White men motivated by a single fervent religion, nor is her America Frost’s “outright gift” claimed first by those who sailed on Susan Constant, Godspeed, and Discovery, Mayflower and Arbella, and then later pursued by European pioneers who shared dreams of conquest as well as Race and Faith with their forbearers. Gorman’s Inaugural poem emphasizes shared responsibility instead of inherited propriety; Americans must see themselves as stewards of democracy not owners of a continent. The past demands reparations, certainly figurative and perhaps literal, if our future is to attain a closer realization of the stated national promise. She has no illusions, no false hopes; she acknowledges “… we are far from polished/far from pristine,” and a better American future depends upon the tolerance and inclusion of all, the choice of debate over division, and the decision to “…lay down our arms/ so we can reach out our arms/ to one another.”

Ultimately a comparison of the two Inaugural poems cannot serve as a “cancelation” of Frost, nor as judgmental erasure of his other “American Lit.” brethren – Hawthorne, Melville, Fitzgerald, and certainly not Twain or Faulkner, whose flawed (by 2021 standards) first steps provided some prophetic glimpses of our current national strife… is there any doubt that Percy Grimm would have taken part in the assault on the Capitol? Instead “The Hill We Climb” is a welcome expansion of American Truths told by Baldwin, Morrison, and Wilson as well as Erdrich, Hong Kingston, Diaz, Kushner, and others since 1961. Amanda Gorman ends her poem with a rhyming couplet in which both lines begin with “if.”  Ascending her hill, reaching the top depends on “if” in 2021, we are “…brave enough to see it” and “…brave enough to be it.” Arriving at a “true” American Literature depends on a similar vision and willingness to assess what we read and what we teach.