[65 years ago Wednesday, John F. Kennedy was inaugurated as President. One of the most famous parts of that January 1961 event was Robert Frost’s powerful poem, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy that text and other occasional poetry from American history. Leading up to a first for this blog, a piece of my own creative writing!]
On how an occasional ode reflects the equal boldness of its author and subject.
Nearly thirteen years ago, I focused a Black History Month post (part of a series on inspiring historical conversations) on the enslaved poet Phillis Wheatley’s rumored in-person conversation with Continental Army General George Washington in March 1776. As I wrote in an IMPORTANT PPS that I added as a comment below the post, the awesome Revolutionary War and Boston history scholar J.L. Bell followed up with a note that there’s no real evidence that that meeting actually took place, and it now seems to me unlikely that it did. But what’s much more definitive (as Bell also notes in his comment) is Washington’s invitation to Wheatley to visit him at his Cambridge headquarters, as well as the reasons behind that striking invite: the young poet had recently penned her 1775 ode “To His Excellency George Washington”; and had then (as I note in that prior post) sent the poem to Washington himself, along with a letter introducing herself and defending her choice tosuch a work (despite her status as an enslaved person).
If we turn to that 1775 poem itself, we can find a similarly striking presence of Wheatley herself in her ode to Washington and the Revolutionary American cause. She uses three first-person singular pronouns, and while one represents a moment of self-deprecation (“Shall I to Washington their praise recite?/Enough thou know’st them in the fields of fight.”), the other two position the author as both overtly part of the poem’s occasion (“Celestial choir! enthron’d in realms of light,/Columbia’s scenes of glorious toils I write.”) and directly petitioning the heavens on behalf of Washington and the cause (“Muse! Bow propitious while my pen relates/How pour her armies through a thousand gates”). And those earlier references mean that the start of the poem’s climactic stanza, “Proceed, great chief, with virtue on thy side,/Thy ev’ry action let the Goddess guide,” while making Washington the official subject of the sentence, nonetheless positions Wheatley herself as an equally powerful participant in the moment, a voice that parallels both Washington and the Goddess there.
The poem is an ode to Washington, of course, and after those two lines the final couplet reinforces that emphasis, in typography as well as content: “A crown, a mansion, and a throne that shine,/With gold unfading, WASHINGTON! Be thine.” But Wheatley’s bold choices likewise add another layer to her content, an underlying argument about the revolutionary place and ideas that this military layer symbolizes. We see that most clearly in the opening of the fourth stanza: “One century scarce perform’d its destined round,/When Gallic powers Columbia’s fury found;/And so may you, whoever dares disgrace/The land of freedom’s heaven-defended race!/Fix’d are the eyes of nations on the scales,/For in their hopes Columbia’s arm prevails.” I’ve written elsewhere about Wheatley’s complex and crucial poetic arguments for the Revolutionary cause, and included them as both celebratory and active patriotism in the first chapter of Of Thee I Sing. We can see all those layers to both the poet and her works here in this very early American occasional poem.
Next occasional poem tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Occasional poetry you’d share?
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