*Originally Published in the September 2023 Newsletter* Art produced by famous people inevitably attracts interest. Long-standing legends attribute the song “Greensleeves” (a.k.a. “What Child Is This”) to King Henry VIII; countless more fans are attracted to the photography and verse of Viggo Mortensen because he was Aragorn than would have been interested in it on its merits. Taylor Swift publishes “poetry” (in notable literary journal, Vogue) and George W. Bush’s paintings hang in galleries. Bush isn’t the first president to dabble in the arts, but most of his predecessors stuck to literary forms. Rhetoric was their primary study, for its practical applications, but some explored other genres, including poetry. Of presidents who have raised oratory to an art form, Lincoln, with his Biblical cadences, Senecan rhetorical balance, and native idiom shows a literary richness equal to the great poets of his time, including Whitman, Longfellow, and Dickinson. But while it’s clear Lincoln appreciated poetry, he didn’t take his own verse very seriously, as when he penned, “I wrote in both hast and speed / and left it here for fools to read.” Other early American presidents couldn’t resist the call of meter, as chronicled in a fascinating collection on the Library of Congress website. Young Washington, lovestruck, wrote his heart “now lays Bleeding every Hour,” as if he were a wounded grandfather clock. Jefferson fared only slightly better, though it was Tyler who could absolutely punish a conceit—”The springtime has its violets, / The summer has its rose; / The autumn has its varied tints, / But winter has its snows.” 20th-century presidents were similarly unable to avoid exposing themselves. Harding stirred up a pot of mixed metaphor: “Who cares not what was wrough[t] today / Of the medley that fate has whirled?” and Carter published an entire volume of zapped-out aphorism: ”knowing that this galaxy of ours / is one of multitudes / in what we call the heavens, / it troubles me. It troubles me.” Obama flirts with dadaism: “Under water grottos, caverns / Filled with apes / That eat figs.” With the presidential record of poetry so dicey, it’s no surprise many commander-in-chiefs avoided it. That didn’t mean they could ignore it. In 1963 Kennedy loftily intoned that whenever “power leads man towards arrogance, poetry reminds [us of our] limitations” and that it establishes “the touchstone of our judgment.” It was of course his friend Robert Frost whom Kennedy was eulogizing, and perhaps Kennedy’s admiration of Frost did serve to ground him. #@callout When folks tell me poetry teaches humility, I wonder if the same thing couldn’t be said about nearly anything that’s harder than it looks, from ballroom dancing to working retail. Whether you believe America needs more celebrity-poets like Robert Frost, Dylan Thomas, and Edna St. Vincent Millay, or whether you believe a true poet must die in obscurity like Dickinson, can any of them really show us of our limitations, as Kennedy promised? When folks tell me poetry teaches humility, I wonder if the same thing couldn’t be said about nearly anything that’s harder than it looks, from ballroom dancing to working retail. One of the most enjoyable features of great poetry is its lack of limitation—and it certainly helps me forget about mine. I love to lose myself in a long Whitman passage or stare off, dumbstruck at another Dickinson volta. The poetry of Carter and his ilk can’t teach us anything by comparison, merely dumping us depressingly back on our priors. Most poetry is bad, fortune is mostly random, and life is mostly unfair. Carter likely didn’t expect laurels for his effort, any more than Bush Jr. expects to find his paintings at the Met. But neither would mind. Politicians seem more vain and needy than the rest of us—but then again, we elect them to represent who we are and what we desire. They are of us, not above us. Coolidge, in his capacity of governor of Massachusetts, once admonished the state legislature, looking to raise its own pay, with a veto and the famous line, “No person was ever honored for what he received. Honor has been the reward for what he gave.” I can only assume his veto was eventually overridden.