This year marks the 100th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s birth. To celebrate that occasion and also President Kennedy’s Oct. 26, 1963, visit to, and speech at, Amherst College, the College will host a forum on “Poetry and Politics.” The forum will trace the thread connecting President Kennedy’s concerns with the College’s current interest in, to use President Martin’s words, setting “an example of community characterized by openness and respect, freedom with responsibility, and politics inflected by poetry.”
President Kennedy used his remarks at the College to honor Robert Frost and to extol the virtues of the poetic in political life. The President noted that Frost “saw poetry as the means of saving power from itself.” “When power,” President Kennedy continued, “leads man towards arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses. For art establishes the basic human truth which must serve as the touchstone of our judgment.”
Recently, President Martin returned to this theme, saying that a politics inflected by poetry would nurture “a way of approaching things that lets them come in in their strangeness or their otherness and does not rush to grasp things in the terms we have adopted in advance. An approach that lets others live requires … the art of receiving and the lessons of slowness, which foster the ability to see before comprehension.”