President Biden wears his Irish Catholic heritage on his sleeve – a fact that will be on full display during his visit to Ireland this coming week. The trip marks the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement that ended violence in Northern Ireland. But it is also a personal visit. Biden plans to see two counties where he has family roots.
So while Biden is expected to talk diplomacy and economics, there’s a very good chance he also cites the great Irish poets William Butler Yeats and Seamus Heaney along the way. Afterall, Biden quotes Irish poets so often, he has a joke about it.
“They always used to kid me because I am always quoting Irish poets on the floor of the Senate,” Biden said at a White House event in honor of the singer Elton John. “They think I did it because I’m Irish. That’s not the reason. I do it because they’re the best poets in the world.”
Biden tells this joke a lot, usually right before quoting some more Irish poetry.
Dan Cluchey, who was a senior presidential speech writer in the early part of the Biden administration, said sometimes Biden would ask his speech writers to include a stanza from Heaney or Yeats. Other times the writers would just proactively do it, knowing the president would want it. And sometimes if there wasn’t any Irish poetry written into the speech, Biden would just toss some in from memory on the fly.
“I wouldn’t say that he exclusively quotes Irish poets,” Cluchey said. “But I think you’re probably looking at a ratio of at least a 90/10 scenario.”
A deep connection to W.B. Yeats
Biden frequently returns to a line from “Easter, 1916” by Yeats.
“All changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born,” the poem goes. It is about a failed uprising in Ireland’s fight for independence from Great Britain, but Biden has applied it to an America divided, a changing world, the aftermath of wildfires in California and to mark the Jewish High Holy Days. And yes, it appeared in many Senate floor speeches.
But that is far from the only Yeats line that Biden has at the tip of his tongue.
“Think where man’s glory most begins and ends and say, my glory was I had such friends,” Biden recited at a White House event honoring the Irish rock band U2.
Biden added that those are “words that echo from an island close to my heart as a descendent of County Mayo and County Louth.” Biden’s ancestors left Ireland during the famine to come to the U.S. on what were known as coffin ships, because so many people died on the journey.
POETRY
How Rhythm Carries A Poem, From Head To Heart
Yeats won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1923 for giving “expression to the spirit of a whole nation.” For Biden, the compulsion to quote his words runs deep. During a CNN town hall in 2020, Biden described himself as a child using his uncle Ed Finnegan’s book of Yeats as he worked to overcome his stutter.
“I’d get up in the night — in the middle of the night — with a flashlight, and I’d look in the mirror and I would try to memorize what I could,” Biden said. He would stare at his face, concentrating hard not to contort it when he got caught on a word.
courtesy: NPR.org
