After poet and Yale professor Elizabeth Alexander was announced as the inaugural poet, fellow poet Paul Muldoon was quoted as saying he was confident the choice was due to literary merit. I hope there was a twinkle in his eye when he said this. Literary merit surely was one consideration, but one doesn't have to be a cynic to suspect it wasn't the only one.
Inaugural poets, like other inaugural speakers, have always been chosen for symbolic reasons as well. John F. Kennedy's choice of Robert Frost as the first inaugural poet was the closest to entirely merit based. When John F. Kennedy chose him, Frost was something like our national poet. He was beloved, had carefully tended his reputation as the people's poet, and was widely (though sometimes grudgingly) admired by other poets. (The closest poet to this status today is probably Billy Collins, but he does not have Frost's status among fellow poets and does not seem quite so all- American). Although Frost was an obvious pick, he also symbolized the old fashioned (implicitly Protestant) traditions of rural
A key attraction of Alexander to Obama, it seems to me, is that her poetry is intensely race conscious, but in a way that is less hostile to mainstream American culture and less anchored in grievance than the work of many of the best known black poets of the past generation. She is, in a sense, a bridge between that past and post racial politicians like Obama himself. (More on this, hopefully, in a follow up post on Alexander's poems once I've read more of it).
First, the three administrations that have included inaugural poets have all been Democrats. For one who usually votes Republican, this pattern reinforces a depressing sense that the Republican party doesn't mesh especially well with the arts. It certainly isn't inevitable that poets and other artists almost all lean Democratic. Many of the titans of early twentieth century poetry--such as Wallace Stevens and T.S. Eliot--were quite conservative. But despite a few efforts to the contrary, we seem to be in a period when conservatism and the arts don't mix so well.
Second, even if Democrats have a monopoly on the emerging tradition of inaugural poets so far, the tradition also seems peculiarly American. In
