Elizabeth Alexander's "Praise Song for the Day" is a perfect specimen of ... bureaucratic verse, comments Adam Kirsch in The New Republic:
The poem's argument was as hard to remember as its language; it dissolved at once into the circumambient solemnity. Alexander has reminded us of what Angelou's, Williams's, and even Robert Frost's inauguration poems already proved: that the poet's place is not on the platform but in the crowd, that she should speak not for the people but to them.
Somewhat like the president's only occasionally exalted, often middling, prose....
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