The Poetry of Politics
The artistry of Amanda Gorman’s “The Hill We Climb”
It’s rare that poetry makes the news, much less dominates it. Last week was an exception, with Amanda Gorman’s stunning inaugural poem, “The Hill We Climb,” inspiring an outpouring of media attention, from Twitter mentions to think pieces in major outlets.
Much of this attention focused on Gorman’s charismatic presence, which is indeed impressive, not least for her poise in addressing a national audience at the age of 23. The politics of the poem also took center stage. The Guardian called Gorman “the voice of a new American era.” Writing in the New Yorker, Masha Gessen treats the poem as a kind of political philosophy, perceptively noting that the poem offers a model of democracy not so much in process as unattained: our work and our dream.
Although her piece emphasizes the poem’s politics, Gessen at least has the astuteness to allude to Langston Hughes as a poetic forebear. By contrast, Dwight Garner’s attempt to analyze the poetry of “The Hill We Climb” in the New York Times diminishes both the poet and her work in a textbook example of damning with faint praise. Garner begins by lauding Gorman’s “thrice-scrubbed innocence” and asserting that the poem’s “cadences…fell somewhere between Lauren Hill and [Maya] Angelou.” Although nominally complimentary, comparing Gorman favorably to previous, more established inaugural poets like Robert Frost and Elizabeth Alexander, Garner’s discussion of the poem insists on marginalizing it by locating its style and significance only in relation to historically Black, and largely contemporary, poetic styles. Lauren Hill and Maya Angelou circumscribe the horizon of the poem’s influence in Garner’s reading, with hip-hop and Hamilton dominating the ridgeline. He suggests at one point that our enthusiasm for the poem evokes a desire for more spectacle in politics: “Schumer on Ice!” is the proposed analogue.
Aside from its patronizing tone, this narrow reading misses the place that the poem holds in a much longer tradition. Yes, Gorman has acknowledged that she was inspired by contemporary media, including Hamilton (to which she makes two explicit references in the poem). And the poem uses many of the poetic techniques of hip-hop lyrics, which themselves draw on Black artistic traditions of music and poetry. But these influences also join Gorman’s poem with a cross-cultural tradition of performance poetry. Poetry has, in fact, a longer oral than written history. Although today we’re taught to read poetry as a private expression of individuality, public poetry predates this model. Indeed, Western Classical and medieval poetry, from Homeric epic to Chaucer’s tales, has communal gathering as its occasion and its purpose. While contemporary instances of performed poetry breathe exciting new life into the tradition, ignoring its history unfairly diminishes Gorman’s achievement.
To understand Gorman’s place in this history, it’s helpful to examine her specific poetic techniques. One of these is stressed alliteration: “To compose a country committed to all cultures, colors, characters, and conditions of man.” Old English poetry, largely composed to be recited, is also structured on a four-stress, alliterative line. The masterpiece Beowulf’s iconic first line, “Hwaet, we Gar-Dena in gear-dagum” (Hark! We spear-Danes in days past) sets the pattern.
Gorman’s poem also features what’s called “feminine rhyme” in traditional Western poetics. This is a two-syllable rhyme, with emphasis on the penultimate syllable, as in her triumphant final lines: “if only we’re brave enough to see it / If only we’re brave enough to be it.” In the Western tradition, such a rhyme is called “feminine” because it is perceived to be weaker and more trivial than end-stopped, “masculine” rhyme (also simply called “rhyme,” with all the gender politics that implies.) Traditional poetic manuals might note that it is common in so-called “light” verse, such as the librettos of Gilbert and Sullivan: “Here’s good luck to Frederic’s ventures! Frederic’s out of his indentures,” from the Pirates of Penzance. But feminine rhyme is extremely powerful in many contexts. The penultimate stress is a feature of jazz phrases, like Coltrane’s rendition of “Too Young to Go Steady,” itself drawing on a typically sung “ballad rhythm” of premodern and early modern English poetry.
“The Hill We Climb” is frequently isocolonic, featuring phrases of the same length that have an almost syllogistic effect: “That even as we grieved, we grew. / That even as we hurt, we hoped. / That even as we tired, we tried.” This technique is often used in performed poetry that wants to persuade or instruct, such as Polonius’ famous advice to Laertes in Hamlet: “Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice;/ Take each man’s censure, but reserve thy judgment” (I.iii.68–69). But isocolons can also have a more active, provocative force in, for example, Gwendolyn Brooks’ “We Real Cool”: “We real cool. We / Left school. We / Lurk late” and so forth.
The long line is another important syntactic unit in Gorman’s poem, a technique reaching back in English-language poetry to Christopher Smart and Walt Whitman in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries respectively, and masterfully reworked by Langston Hughes in “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” Whitman’s long line is an especially noteworthy forerunner for Gorman’s poem. Credited with exploding the constraints of formal English verse, modeled on the iambic pentameter line since Chaucer’s time (and yes, it’s Chaucer and not Shakespeare who invents this line in English), Whitman instead favors sprawling sentences that, in reaching across the page, were capacious enough to render his own vision of inclusive democracy. The many lists in “Song of Myself” at once catalog and affirm the variety of humanity:
The hurrahs for popular favorites, the fury of rous’d mobs,
The flap of the curtain’d litter, a sick man inside borne to the hospital,
The meeting of enemies, the sudden oath, the blows and fall,
The excited crowd, the policeman with his star quickly working his passage to the center of the crowd….
As innovative and incandescent as Whitman’s poem is, it nonetheless centers on a selfhood expressed by the first person: “I celebrate myself and sing myself / And what I assume you shall assume,” as the famous first lines state. By contrast, one of the most generous poetic techniques in “The Hill We Climb” is the use of what we might call the lyric “we.” The idea that the first-person subject, the “I,” ought to be the speaker of poetry, has a Western history dating back to Petrarch in the fourteenth century, invigorated in English by Shakespeare’s sonnets and the contemplative poetry of the nineteenth-century Romantic poets like Wordsworth and Coleridge. Today, if you ask students to “write a poem” with no other direction, they are likely to write in the first person.
Gorman is not the first contemporary poet to use this capacious pronoun. The serial poem “Song of the Andoumboulou” by Nathaniel Mackey comes to mind as a masterpiece of the poetic “we.” (If you’ve never read Mackey, buy Splay Anthem, the best introduction to the multi-volume poem, right now.) Where Mackey’s poems create a mythic paraworld that forms a refraction of our own political and social realities, Gorman’s poem comes more directly from an activist tradition. I think one of the reasons that Gorman’s poem had so much impact is that her “we” is radically inclusive, inviting a middle-aged white woman like myself to say, along with her, “We did not feel prepared to be the heirs of such a terrifying hour.”
Whether or not Gorman was thinking about Beowulf or Whitman or Mackey (as far as I know she hasn’t mentioned them in interviews) as she composed her poem is beside the point. Poets, like all artists, are subject to influences that have come down to them in highly mediated forms. What’s more important is to recognize that her poem joins a deep history of oral and communal poetry that crosses racialized aesthetic boundaries. In a classic essay titled “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” Langston Hughes validates and glorifies Black artistic traditions. For Hughes, “the mountain standing in the way of any true Negro art in America [is] this urge within the race toward whiteness, the desire to pour racial individuality into the mold of American standardization.” Hughes advocates for Black artists of his era to affirm Black traditions, and especially the Black poetic techniques of Blues lyrics and idiomatic speech, as high art. Gorman’s poem proudly draws on Black artistic traditions but does so in a way that updates Hughes’ mandate for a poetics of inclusivity. I have to wonder if the poem’s title, “The Hill We Climb,” is a nod to Hughes’ “racial mountain.” Gorman’s poem is a generous vision of our fallibility and our potential as individuals and as a political body. Let’s be just as generous and open in how we read its poetic artistry.
