Poetry is unquestionably linked with speechwriting. The most memorable and effective addresses use literary devices to make policies palatable to the public. Yet many speeches rely on ornamental poetry alone. Though a clever turn of phrase or the use of words that strike emotional chords might move audiences briefly, poeticism is most potent when paired with meaningful content. That is to say, a little bit of flair—in all its different rhetorical and literary manifestations—makes a speech artistic and powerful. A speech with strong content and policies that is overwhelmed with imagery and alliteration, then, is also ineffective. Its message is lost. Style is substance in political speechwriting, in that presidents must be entertainers in order to ensure they are effective explainers. Poetic techniques are intrinsically tied to the success of public addresses, and content can only be successfully disseminated when tied to attractively phrased sound bites.
Beyond the fact that poetry is present and important to speeches, then, is the idea that not all literary devices are the same. Certain common techniques, like rampant alliteration, poignant imagery, and apt metaphors, are found in countless speeches ranging from Abraham Lincoln’s renowned Gettysburg Address to Barack Obama’s 2008 New Hampshire primary concession speech. However, other, more anomalous devices can make speeches as potent and memorable. Consider the antimetabole in John F. Kennedy’s first inaugural speech, when he famously pronounced, “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country” as an example of one of the more unique instances of poetry in presidential speaking. The particular types of phrasing and cadence that can keep a speech forever in the nation’s memory are hard to pinpoint, but it is patent that poetry affects listeners on a visceral level. As such, the longevity and popularity of the most famous addresses in American history is due to rhythm and rhyme, applied in good measure, good context, and good taste: a difficult blend to produce, but one important to producing speeches that move public audiences while contributing to a president’s written legacy.
Speech as Poetry
“The basic purpose of political rhetoric is to ‘move men to action or alliance,’” said former Kennedy and Johnson speechwriter Richard Goodwin. Indeed, the main goal of presidential speeches is rarely education. Persuasion and agenda setting are paramount, and words must captivate audiences with short attention spans and shorter memories. State of the Unions and inaugural addresses are, perhaps, the best examples of inspiring speeches, but almost every widely-covered or moderately important address is sure to contain sections dedicated solely to poignancy and appeals to emotion. In the words of Clinton speechwriter Jeff Shesol, “the words that excite us are also the words that can change us—words that stretch our national sense of self, that make us believe we really can end Jim Crow and win a war and put a man on the moon.” His words indicate that poetry facilitates the lofty speech so necessary to communicate a message across the vast diversity of America; furthermore, the emotional reaction triggered by a speech incites citizens to action. Regardless of creed, ethnicity, age, or gender, common themes of patriotism and unity are easily understandable and achievable, all due to a few choice words and artistic phrasing.
Poetry is vital to speechwriting for yet another, more pragmatic reason. Because imagery, alliteration, and other literary devices strike emotional chords through evocative pictures or sounds, they allow easy, instinctive communication of ideas between teams of speechwriters and the men that they write for. That is to say, when speechwriters have limited access to a president or have to collaborate on an address, the poetry is the common language that permits disparate parts of a speech to finally coalesce. More importantly, a president can take the words of a speechwriter—foreign as they might be, since others write them—but can immediately understand the emotion and communicate it to an audience because of the universality of poetry. Poetry is practical.
In fact, poetry is an inherent duty of speechwriters. According to Ben Stein, a speechwriter to Robert Nixon, “good speechwriting is the ability to make the prosaic poetic.” Indeed, it seems that some aides have an intrinsic talent: they wax literary even when speaking about their own experiences casually, impromptu. There is no need for hours spent crafting a speech with the perfect versed line when writers like former Clinton aide Jordan Tamagni can create poetry on the fly, almost unintentionally. While talking about the principles of speechwriting in January 2012, she pointed out that without well-reasoned arguments, “rhetoric hangs like wet laundry on a line.” Interestingly enough, without her colorful simile, perhaps her point would not have been as memorable.
Poetry is important to speechwriting, and perhaps that is why some speechwriters have actually been carefully selected poets. Professional poets were sometimes hired by speechwriting staffs as special consultants, while in other administrations, one speechwriter might be designated the “staff poet.” Even Franklin Delano Roosevelt relied on calling “poet Archibald MacLeish, who served as librarian of Congress during the 1940s, or some other close adviser, to come in and lend a hand.” One of Nixon’s other speechwriters, William Gavin, had the unofficial duty of being in charge of “rich, velvety, rippling sort of stuff.”
Yet the legacy of speeches is not that of speechwriters, but that of the presidents they serve. Thus, the poetry carefully worked into speeches is meant to create lines that will be remembered for generations. When poetry and structure is left behind in favor of conversational speech, however, the results rarely lend themselves toward contributing to a thrilling and historic address. Take President Clinton’s speech on Nov. 13th, 1993 on “What Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Would Say If He Were Alive Today”: he “disregarded his notes” when giving the speech, which was about national violence, and used colloquialisms. Though the speech was initially lauded by the press, over time “the president’s words seemed to vanish from the national consciousness.” Ad-libbing seemed to have been a trend with Clinton, confirmed Tamagni—perhaps a reason why there are so few memorable quotes associated with his time in office unrelated to his impeachment. Compared to countless indelible remarks by Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy, both of whom relied heavily on their carefully cultivated speeches, perhaps Clinton’s forgettable remarks were so ephemeral because they were full of popular sayings, jocularity, and bonhomie, but contained little of the poignancy of poetry.
Presidents and their staff are well aware of the necessity of a historical legacy memorialized in not only successful policy action, but in the speeches that spurred said actions. Tamagni recalled being scolded by advisor Rahm Emanuel after he read a draft of one of her speeches for Clinton, when he asked if she was deliberately trying to write an address that was not memorable. Almost half a century earlier, F.D.R. realized the importance of writing strong speeches as well. His adviser, Robert Sherwood remembered that his president “knew that all those words would constitute the bulk of the estate he would leave posterity and that his ultimate measurement would depend on the reconciliation of what he said with what he did.”
American history is rife with memorable speeches and lines that, when analyzed, are replete with poetry. Lincoln’s “better angels of our nature,” Obama’s “Yes We Can,” and Kennedy’s “Ask not what your country” are all examples of lines that remain in the national consciousness. They are repeated, mantra-like, in history books and by nostalgic pundits. A speech’s memorability depends on the conciseness and emotional impact of its content, which makes poetry integral to successful addresses. In just a few short words, poetry enables complicated or abstract ideas to fuse in a unique, brief form that allows an audience to quickly realize and remember connections between speech points and overarching themes.
Putting Metaphors to Work
Now, much of the discussion of poetry’s utility is in an overarching sense: a closer look at varying literary techniques provides a more textured picture of how words and syntax impact presidential speeches. Sometimes subtle, poetic devices add value to a speech in multifarious ways, just as they might contribute to prose and, of course, poetry. Abraham Lincoln, long revered for penning some of America’s most defining words, was an expert at using a vast range of literary ornaments that ultimately made his speeches more idiosyncratic and complex. Former Kennedy speechwriter and fellow wordsmith Ted Sorensen said of his predecessor:
“Lincoln avoided the fancy and artificial. He used the rhetorical devices that the rest of us speechwriters do: alliteration (‘Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray’; ‘no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet’); rhyme (‘I shall adopt new views so fast as they shall appear to be true views’); repetition (‘As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew’; ‘We cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground’); and—especially—contrast and balance (‘The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present’; ‘As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master’; ‘In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free’).”
The key takeaway from Sorensen’s analysis is that Lincoln not only used a great variety of poetic devices, but also that he used them to add to a speech rather than embellish it. Each instance of metaphor had meaning; there was no alliteration just for alliteration’s sake. Thus, it appears that poetic devices are not interchangeable. A highfalutin allegory means nothing to an audience that does not understand it, while vivid imagery will evoke memories and feelings easily.
Of course, there is always disagreement over which poetic devices are the most effective. Former George W. Bush speechwriter John McConnell remembered once that he and the rest of the speechwriting staff realized “this really great line rhymed, and then it was absurd” because everyone in the room initially thought they “were Churchill, but [they] ended up Dr. Seuss.” Contrastingly, Sorensen felt that the rhyme “I shall adopt new views so fast as they shall appear to be true views” helped Lincoln make his point in his letter to Horace Greeley. The key word here is, of course, letter. Spoken aloud—at least in modern days—a blatant rhyme seems egregiously childlike. McConnell also suggested that it was important to be careful when using alliteration, possibly because an excessive amount would be too obvious and would negate any potential benefits of a more subtle delivery. After all, who would want to listen to a silly speech stuffed with susurrations? The general rule of using poetic devices in speechwriting seems to be that all good things come in moderation. Said McConnell, one should only use “some nice illustrations if they add to the point” of the address—even though a picture is worth a thousand words, it is not worth using a thousand words to paint a picture.
While appropriate usage of poetic language can contribute to an address, equally important to speeches are rhythm and timing. A politician’s poor delivery can forever maim a speech, depriving it of its potential impact and grandeur. Take, for example, President George H.W. Bush, who, according to his speechwriter Mark Davis, “‘rarely got involved in the style’” and “‘would have served himself a little better if he had.’” Because speeches are written in a poetic style so “what may appear, on the page, to be an incomplete or run-on sentence” and they “might achieve a compelling cadence or rhythm that works well when spoken,” it is the duty of the speaker to enunciate and emote. Speechwriters help presidents by building applause lines in speeches or keeping sentences shorter, similar to lines in a poem. Applause lines are, in fact, a key technique. Analogous to stanza breaks, setting pauses after politically loaded comments is unmistakably strategic in terms of politicking, as moments for applause are often engineered so that it would be uncouth for an opposing party to refrain from applauding. Former Carter speechwriter James Fallows describes such a break, following a section regarding taxes and income inequality in Obama’s 2011 State of the Union speech, as a “another ‘let’s dare the Republicans not to cheer for this’ line.” In addition to the political rationale behind pauses, it is important to remember that brief breaks between ideas are calculated for audiences hearing the speech in the room or at home, allowing the listeners to process information and silently agree.
Modernizing Technique
The applause line, however, is a recent invention spurred by the advent of television and the institutional media coverage. After all, the past fifty years have seen a marked change in speech types, since they have marked a “conversational age, not an oratorical age.” There was no need for Washington, Lincoln, and Jefferson to include applause lines in their speeches, which were intended for print distribution. Now, says McConnell, “the State of the Union turns into four hundred applause lines”—all of which are noted in official White House transcripts and documented and analyzed by bloggers like Fallows.
There have been other developments in speechwriting that parallel the development of media technology and the structuring of news delivery, making short, catchy phrases that somehow encapsulate policies and platforms all the more important. The sound bite takes such a significant role in political reporting because the quantity of speeches has increased even as coverage of an individual speech has dropped, a trend associated with the 1900s onwards. After all, “until the early 20th century, American presidents addressed themselves chiefly to the other branches of government, not to the people—and even then, most communications were written rather than spoken.” Lincoln is a prime example of a man who lived in an age when “oratory was important political entertainment; but with no broadcasting, his words reached large audiences outside the immediate vicinity only by print. His speeches were published in the newspapers of the day and composed by him with that in mind.”
That is not the case today. There has been a systematization of speechwriting, as aides often have to produce “one to three speeches a day” to cope with the media burden of the modern age. The speed of speechwriting and speech giving has increased even more rapidly over the past few years:
“Gerald Ford… delivered a speech on average every six hours in 1976…. Jimmy Carter… [added] 9,873 singled-spaced pages to the Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States. Ronald Reagan increased this bulk with another 13,000 pages, and Bill Clinton, in his first year as president, spoke publicly three times as often as Reagan did in his first 12 months.”
Quickly churning out speeches wears on aides, as many are often consigned to writing dry or unimportant addresses for minor events. For inaugural addresses or State of the Union speeches, each writer takes a section or writes in teams, which is detrimental to the unique poetic voice that would have existed with a single speech author. Nixon famously complained why his speechwriters were not on par with those of Woodrow Wilson; his staff retorted that Wilson wrote his own speeches. Many presidents did, until the advent of television.
“Be Sincere, Be Brief”
Franklin Delano Roosevelt once proclaimed his rules for speakers: “Be sincere; be brief; be seated.” Similarly, Jordan Tamagni said the three questions she asked herself while proofreading speeches were “Is it pompous? Is it soulless? Is it endless?” It seems that, with the inclusion of poetry, speeches cannot be pompous if literary devices are used carefully; speeches cannot be soulless if poetry inspires Americans to action; and speeches cannot be endless in an age where television necessitates quick, poem-like lines. Perhaps poetry is so associated with presidential speechwriting because its subtleties, complexities, passions, and humanity so parallel the political nature of the executive office. John McConnell, summarizing the tenets of great speechwriting, suggested prose that allows for “feeling that can be felt not because you announced it, but because you conveyed it”—precisely the sentiment resulting from skilled application of poetry to presidential speeches.
