Miriam Goldstein

April 25, 2014

Bewailing the Loss of a Gallant Young Chief: What JFKs Assassination Reveals about What
Mattered Most in America, 1963-1964
The campus is silent/As if each relative creature/Had been informed/That/Its terrestrial
creator/Ceased to/Breathe/The air of freedom/So plentiful/In our democracy. Malcolm P. Mac
Reid, a then-freshman at Bates College (an abolitionist-founded liberal arts school in central
Maine), wrote these lines of poetry the day of President John F. Kennedys November 22, 1963
assassination. Interviewed for a fiftieth-anniversary article on the colleges reaction to the
shooting, Reid, whose poem Death of a President first appeared in a December 4, 1963 edition
of the school paper, praised poetrys ability to make connections with people [we] know and
care about.1 When President Kennedy passed away that Friday in November, he threw a whole
people, a whole world, into a state of mourning. That is why Reid felt the need to share his
poem, his own expression of grief, with the larger community; to say what everyone realized but
did not state in words: You are not alone.
Many others also submitted poems for publication to their local papers in the weeks and
months following Kennedys death. By November 27, over 300 poems mostly from those who
had not considered themselves poets had made their way to the desk of New York Times writer
Thomas Lask alone. Lask called this outpouring of verse one of the strangest phenomena in
the expression of grief over the death of President Kennedy2 Unlike Reid, these authors never
provided any explanation of what poetry meant to them, so Lask and others could only speculate
as to why so many chose this art form as a way to express their grief, citing catharsis, a desire to
find meaning in the incident, or a sense of duty to commemorate their leader as some
possibilities.3 However, just because it is not always possible to determine what compelled
people to write the poems does not make them any less valuable. Poetry in itself often
communicates more than any simple statement ever could. Indeed, according to famed poet W.
H. Auden, who incidentally wrote one of the poems commemorating the assassination, [p]oetry
is the clear expression of mixed feelings. 4 When people are having difficulty fully grasping
their deepest emotions, poetry can help them find that truth. Reids poem, for example, reveals
that Kennedys assassination greatly shocked a people who felt any guarantee of security and
protection yanked out from under them. This poem is not the only one that expresses sorrow at
the loss of something greater than Kennedy himself. In fact, the majority of them those written
by common Americans and acclaimed poets alike refer to larger themes, most commonly
loss of innocence and unfulfilled promise to make the world a better place, that reveal what truly
mattered most to Americans living in the mid-1960s.
1

Jay Burns, After JFKs assassination, The Bates Student reflects a grieving community, Bates College.
http://www.bates.edu/news/2013/11/19/kennedy-assassination-bates-student/ (accessed February 18, 2014); Bates
College, About Bates, Bates College, http://www.bates.edu/about/ (accessed March 29, 2014).
2
Thomas Lask, Hundreds Vent Grief in Poetry, New York Times, November 28, 1963.
3
Lask; Barry Schwartz, "Mourning and the Making of a Sacred Symbol: Durkheim and the Lincoln
Assassination," Social Forces 70, no. 2 (Dec 01, 1991): 343-363.
http://search.proquest.com.proxy.library.vanderbilt.edu/docview/1291041259?accountid=14816 (accessed February
18, 2014), 354.
4
Erwin A. Glikes and Paul Schwaber, liner notes to Of Poetry and Power: Poems Occasioned by the Presidency
and by the Death of John F. Kennedy, Irene Dailey and Martin Donegan, Folkways Records FL 9721. LP, 1965;
David Barber, A Lifes Work, The Atlantic, March 2, 2005,
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2005/04/a-lifes-work/303856/ (accessed March 29, 2014), quoted in
Georgia Heard, Celestino: A Tribute to the Healing Power of Poetry, Voices from the Middle 16, no. 3 (March
2009): 9-14, http://search.proquest.com/docview/213930211/266B666E72A04526PQ/3?accountid=14816 (accessed
March 29, 2014).

Miriam Goldstein

April 25, 2014

The Kennedy sixties although a period of great hope and promise, in a large part due to
the man himself also featured its fair share of turmoil. From the January 20, 1961 beginning of
the thousand days to the November 1963 day of JFKs death, the Kennedy administration saw
some of the most memorable moments in Cold War and Civil Rights history, which according to
historian W. J. Rorabaugh, affected the nation on a particularly emotional level.5 Rorabaugh
divides his book, Kennedy and the Promise of the Sixties, into six chapters: Kennedy, The
Cold War, Civil Rights, Families, Cosmologies, and Dallas. It is the middle four that
he believes demonstrate the main reasons why the Kennedy presidency was not the entirely
idyllic period it is frequently portrayed as today. Americans, from elementary schoolers to
retirement home inhabitants, experienced the intense fear that went along with the concrete
possibility of nuclear war presented by the Soviet Unions positioning of nuclear missiles in
Cuba.6 They watched Birmingham police commissioner Bull Connor unleash dogs and fire hoses
on peaceful civil rights demonstrators, stood by as four little girls were blown to bits in the
bombing of a church in the same city, and saw Alabama Governor George Wallace stand at the
schoolhouse door, attempting to halt school desegregation.7 Rorabaugh also addresses the
growing concern for the disintegration of the family, with rapidly rising divorce rates (from one
in six marriages ending in divorce before World War II to one in four by 1960), increasing
instances of religiously inappropriate intermarriage, and a greater number of children born to
women out of wedlock.8 Finally, there is the issue of cosmologies, the term Rorabaugh gives
to cultural upheavals. Although this cultural upheaval included more harmless transitions in
music, art, and literature, it also presented psychedelic drug use, which was often met with
disdain, especially among the older generation.9
For many, Kennedy was to be the answer to all of these mounting dilemmas. The
president came out of the Cuban Missile Crisis, in the eyes of many Americans at the time, as a
swift and determined leader who had saved the country from imminent danger and would
continue to do so.10 When he stood up to Wallaces schoolhouse blockade, following this action
up with a major push for civil rights legislation, he won favor with civil rights activists
everywhere.11 And, of course, Kennedys beautiful, seemingly perfect nuclear family gave the
public something to strive for and be proud of in the face of increasing family instability.12
It is no wonder, then, that Kennedys assassination provoked such an outpouring of grief
for such a beloved leader. The poetry carved out of this grief communicates the beliefs, dreams,
goals, and fears of a distraught people, for they were mourning not just the man but everything
he had promised to give them. Because of the urgency with which they were written, the poems
allow their readers to almost re-experience the atmosphere surrounding JFKs assassination.
Whether they realized it at the time or not, these poets inevitably produced a testament to the
thoughts and feelings of a grieving country.
Others were more deliberate in their attempts to preserve this moment in time for future
generations. In the hours following the assassination, social scientists around the country went to
5

W. J. Rorabaugh, Kennedy and the Promise of the Sixties (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 18, xvi.
Ibid. 190.
7
Ibid. 108-109.
8
Ibid. 145, 135, 142.
9
Ibid. 165, 205.
10
John Hellmann, The Kennedy Obsession: The American Myth of JFK (New York: Columbia University Press,
1997), 137-139.
11
Gretchen Rubin, Forty Ways to Look at JFK (New York: Ballantine Books, 2005), 25.
12
Ibid. 118.
6

Miriam Goldstein

April 25, 2014

work, recording immediate reactions to the tragedy. An assistant professor of psychology at the
University of Denver, assisted by a team of interviewers, examined the nations early thoughts
and emotions, including such features as confidence in the truth of the news of the
assassination, suspected identity of the shooter (political leanings, etc.), and general emotional
reaction at the news. 13 Eight additional surveys, compiled in 1965 but also conducted in the
immediate aftermath of the assassination, all contribute something different to the overall picture
of the public reaction.14 Two focus specifically on the immediate response (with one studying the
whole country while another, asking the same questions, focuses specifically on Dallas, the site
of the assassination), three on the responses of schoolchildren or college students, and a final
three on how feelings about the assassination changed overtime. Many of the surveys are based
off of a survey devised by National Opinion Research Center (NORC) employees Paul B.
Sheatsley and Jacob J. Feldman, and because of this, they unfortunately suffer from many of the
same limitations. For example, although providing seventeen different options from which the
respondent can select to describe his or her reaction to the assassination, there are likely some
reactions that the survey still neglects to cover. Additionally, some respondents may select a
specific response simply because it sounds the most compassionate, even if the response does not
fit the respondents true feelings. For example, the most commonly selected response in
Sheatsley and Feldmans original survey was felt so sorry for his wife and children. Of all the
choices, this one seems to be the most socially responsible, so there is a chance that at least some
respondents chose it for this reason. Asking mostly these close-ended rather than open-ended
questions which would allow the respondents to contribute their thoughts freely, without the
constraints and greater potential for bias that close-ended question present the researchers
inevitably put some limits on the range of possible reactions to the assassination. Both the poets
and surveyors had the opportunity to use Kennedys death to remind themselves, the country,
and the world of what they believed to be the most important things in life.
The tendency to use JFK as a symbol for the countrys (and the citizens of that countrys)
ideals did not originate with his death. In fact, it is almost impossible to write in any depth about
the late president without referring to the Kennedy myth that many authors agree existed long
before his demise.15 According to this myth, Kennedy was the man who would finally give the
country in the face of inequality and perceived deteriorating moral values the rejuvenation it
desperately required, returning it to greatness. He was the nations romantic lover, the object of
our projected fantasies who promised to return us to the scenario of our founding in order to
relive the pleasures and heal the wounds of American history.16 John Hellmann, who is adamant
about Kennedys purposeful molding of himself into this heroic figure, suggests that the myth
even accompanied Kennedy on his 1946 campaign for Congress and continued to follow him in
his subsequent 1952 run for Senate and his 1960 presidential bid.17 Rubin agrees that Kennedy
controlled the evidence that he presented to the public, even having the casual snapshots of

13

Thomas J. Banta, The Kennedy Assassination: Early Thoughts and Emotions, The Public Opinion Quarterly 28,
no. 2 (Summer 1964): 216-224, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2746987 (accessed February 18, 2014)
14
Bradley S. Greenberg and Edwin B. Parker, eds., The Kennedy Assassination and the
American Public: Social Communication in Crisis (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1965).
15
Alice L. George, The Assassination of John F. Kennedy: Political Trauma and American Memory (New York:
Routledge, 2013); John Hellmann, The Kennedy Obsession: The American Myth of JFK (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1997); Gretchen Rubin, Forty Ways to Look at JFK (New York: Ballantine Books, 2005).
16
Hellmann. x.
17
Hellmann, x, 37, 77, 98.

Miriam Goldstein

April 25, 2014

his family posed.18 So, on one level, it appears that people saw in Kennedy what they wanted to
see, but in reality, they could only view this image within a pre-framed context.
Regardless of Kennedys apparent control over his own image, he still had to work in the
context of what was going on in the world. Without the war, where he saved a crewmate from
the wreckage of a boat he commanded in the South Pacific, the war-hero part of his myth would
have been missing.19 Without the existence of the Civil Rights Movement, he would not have
come out as a champion for it. Therefore, despite the scholarship devoted to the idea of the selfmade Kennedy myth, Kennedy had to work with what he had. That means that people did not
just hope for in Kennedy what he wanted them to desire. They, just like JFK himself, were
pushed and pulled by the currents of current events, and they therefore wished for not just what
was convenient for Kennedy to become, but for what the world needed most at the time.
Kennedy may have been the figurehead of all of this, but he had to earn his place.
Because Kennedy was the countrys appointed savior, the poetry written in the aftermath
of his assassination should reveal what the nation longed for most, what it hoped it would find in
this man, and what it felt it had lost with his death. Although most scholars recognize the
existence of the Kennedy myth before the assassination, many also point to the ways in which
the myth became even stronger in the immediate aftermath of his death. Whether or not
Kennedys death helped save his image has been debated among the scholars. However, it is
clear that through much of JFKs presidency, he maintained high approval ratings. According to
Rubin, at 70 percent, Kennedy still has the highest average job-approval rating of any U.S.
president. Rubin does note that this approval rating had dropped down to 59 percent by the latter
half of the 1963, possibly due to Kennedys recent investment in civil rights legislation.20
However, this rating still surpasses the highest rating ever afforded to many other U.S.
presidents. Schwartz, on the other hand, pointing to major news magazines reporting that
Kennedy was in trouble, balanced with the fact of the great mourning of his death, concludes
that it was Kennedys assassination, that, like Lincolns, assassination that resurrected him.21
Whether Kennedy became the Kennedy of todays myth before or after his assassination,
it is clear that people have continued using Kennedys image in the way that they see fit,
regardless of any truth behind it. A reevaluation of Kennedys actual contributions to the nation,
along with personal problems (love affairs, etc.) that place him in a less favorable light, have
reduced Kennedys status in the eyes of many historians, who when polled, once named him the
most overrated figure in U.S. history. However, historians aside, the American public still
appears to have great reverence for Kennedy. A 2004 Gallup poll ranked him as the second
most outstanding president, and a 2003 Gallup poll had him tied with Lincoln for first place.22
It seems as if people have always made Kennedy into what they want and need him to be, and
they need to remember the Kennedy who was full of potential so they do not have to blame
themselves for what became of the sixties. Combining an analysis of the post-Kennedy
assassination poetry (including poetry in the form of song) with a study of the more systematic
surveys, this paper will explore the myriad ways in which Kennedys mourners, even in his
death, continued to use his image to reveal their deepest desires.

18

Rubin, 7, 138-139.
Hellmann, 37.
20
Rubin, 7.
21
Scwhartz, 358-359, 333.
22
Rubin, 5.
19

Miriam Goldstein

April 25, 2014

Scholars, including those already cited above, have studied the ways in which Kennedy
throughout his political career and continuing into the present day has served as a symbol for
what the nation, or what citizens of the nation, hoped to become.23 They paint a broad picture of
the larger topics of interest including the concerns about the Cold War and civil rights already
highlighted above for those living in 1960s America. When poetry is layered on top of the
scholarly sources, these sources come alive. The poetry makes real the themes of the era,
providing them with more luster and vibrancy. Where the existing literature summarizes the
general concerns of the era, the poetry grounds them even further.
Although there is one anthology of Kennedy assassination poems, released in 1965, they
have not been individually analyzed.24 Additionally, because this collection only contains poems
written by professional poets, important segments of society youth, the poor, members of
certain minorities are missing. Fortunately, as mentioned above, many newspapers did publish
poems from the general population. But neither these nor the professional poems have received
much attention in the scholarly literature. Therefore, merely bringing them to light will
contribute something to the current scholarship on what the Kennedy obsession reveals about
what mattered most to the people around the time of the presidents assassination. This paper
also aims to contribute to the scholarship on poetry, affirming its power. The power of poetry
was something Kennedy knew well. In a speech he gave at the 1963 opening of the Robert Frost
Library at Amherst College, he had this to say about the art: When power leads man to
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 this existence. When power
corrupts, poetry cleanses. For art establishes the basic human truth which must serve as the
touchstone of our judgment.25
The most common theme found across the poems is the notion that the president died
before his time, that he still had unfinished business to accomplish, that he was destined to save
the country from its most serious ailments. A shot rang out like a sudden shout, and Heaven
held its breath/For the dreams of a multitude of men rode with him to his death/Lord, rode with
him to his death, sings Connie Francis, complete with characteristic tears in her voice.26 Clearly
written with the intent of reaching a large audience as quickly as possible. The song was
recorded by six different artists, with Millicent Martin originating it with her November 25
performance on a BBC television program. In the Summer of His Years captures what its
writers Herbert Kretzmer and David Lee thought the world most needed to remember about the
fallen president of the United States.27 The song clearly touched many people, so much so that
three versions found themselves ranked on the Billboard chart, including the most popular,
Franciss version, which peaked at number forty-six and remained on the charts for six weeks.28
Its popularity suggests that listeners the world over identified with its message, felt the chance
23

Patricia K. Felkins and Irvin Goldman, Political Myth as Subjective Narrative: Some Interpretations and
Understandings of John F. Kennedy, Political Psychology 14, no. 3 (Sep., 1993): 447-467,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/3791707 (accessed February 18, 2014); George; Hellmann; Rubin.
24
Glikes and Schwaber.
25
John Lundberg, John F. Kennedy and Poetry, Huffington Post, November 24, 2013, accessed March 18, 2014,
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-lundberg/john-f-kennedy-poetry_b_4333727.html.
26
Guido van Rijn, Kennedys Blues: African-American and Gospel Songs on JFK (Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi, 2010), 123.
27
BBC Kennedy Broadcast Is Hot Item, Billboard, December 14, 1963, 1, 3.
28
Joel Whitburn, Joel Whitburn Presents Across the Charts, the 1960s (Menomonee Falls, WI: Record Research
Inc., 2008), 458, 149.

Miriam Goldstein

April 25, 2014

for a better America and a better world a world free from the threat of war and with equality
for all die along with the man who had preached its possibility.29
Further evidence that the issue of Kennedys lost promise was of particular concern for
many comes from numerous other poems that suggest the same thing. One of the 300 poems
referred to in Lasks aforementioned article contains this particularly moving stanza: A horse
walks alone, mid the music of grief,/Bewailing the loss of a gallant young chief,/Shot down in
the battle, his arrows unsped,/His mission unfinished; his message unsaid. Another poem
selected for the same article reads, This, and not April, is the cruelest month/And this the
cruelest year/That cuts the stem before the leaf is green/That sanctions fear,/That kills the young
and brave, the true and good,/That hides the happy sun,/Bringing the winter on before its
time;/This, hate has done. Although this poem also addresses the anxiety that came along with
the presidents assassination and the assassins unfortunate hatred, it is still overwhelming about
a man who died before [his] time. Even the words young and brave, the true and good, taken
in the larger context of the poem, seem to refer to Kennedys valiant plans for the future. With
only a few more risings/And settings of the sun,/The battle would have fought/And the victory
won, writes thirteen-year-old Gwendolyn Kathy Walker, revealing that even those who did not
yet live in the real world had high hopes for its future.30 If only Kennedy had lived a little bit
longer, this girl believes, he would have been able to fulfil his ambitions.
If any group of people should have felt devastated by President Kennedys unfinished
business, it is African-Americans. Kennedy, according to popular belief at the time, had
committed himself to fixing the civil rights issues in this country, and for this reason, many
African-Americans had invested a great deal of hope in him.31 The Sheatsley and Feldman
survey, which divided its respondents by race, even suggests that the two-thirds of Negros who
expressed worry about the future of the nation were thinking about the fate of the Civil Rights
Movement when they gave this response.32 Surprisingly, many of the poems that can be
confirmed to be from black authors tell a different story. He was a man for the nation, yes, he
really did his part, sings big Joe Williams in his original blues song, A Man Amongst Men,
part of a compilation, called Cant Keep from Crying, of eleven songs written by black blues
artists in memory of President Kennedy. Although, as the title of the album and the even the
style of music suggest, it is difficult to deny the sadness present in each song included on the
record, amidst this sorrow, it is possible to find gratitude. According to Williams, the president
really did his part 33 While other poems and songs lament lost potential, this one offers praise
for what the president was able to accomplish. Williams is not alone in this assessment of the
president. Frances Cartwrights poem, while bemoaning the loss of a great friend to the black
community, also recognized how much the president had already done for her people, even
suggesting that he had given more attention to the possibility of a civil rights bill than had
anyone else in the last eighty years. But even that, says Cartwright, was not his greatest deed yet:
Of all the things the things the President has helped us do/Was for the world to return to God in
29

Rubin, 47.
"Student Writes about JFK Assassination," The Chicago Defender, December 14, 1963,
http://search.proquest.com.proxy.library.vanderbilt.edu/docview/493106047?accountid=14816 (accessed February
18, 2014).
31
Rubin, 25.
32
Greenberg and Parker, 149-177.
33
Joseph Haas, "Singing the Blues for the Late President Kennedy," Los Angeles Times, July 26, 1964.
http://search.proquest.com.proxy.library.vanderbilt.edu/docview/154958934?accountid=14816 (accessed February
18, 2014) (emphasis mine).
30

Miriam Goldstein

April 25, 2014

prayer fresh and new. 34 This appears to be not only an observation but a suggestion for what the
world should do next continue in prayer. Why does she think prayer is so important? Perhaps
she believes it is the ultimate answer to curing the worlds problems.
Many others also declared that if there is one thing people can do, it is to ensure that what
Kennedy set into motion does not lose its momentum. British Poet Laureate John Masefield
closed his six-line poem with this plea: Grant to us life that though the man be gone/The
promise of his spirit be fulfilled.35 W. H. Auden had a similar message to share: What he has,
he was:/What he is fated to become/Depends on us/Remembering his death,/How we choose to
live/Will decide its meaning.36 Not only do these lines express a duty owed to the president, but
they suggest an understanding that the man and what he stood for were separable: accomplishing
the goals that Kennedy stood for was not contingent on him being alive. Both poets believe that
others can and should take it upon themselves to continue Kennedys legacy (whether most of
his accomplishments were real or imagined), and in writing their poems, they believe they are
helping to ensure that it does happen.
The common theme of the poems discussed so far is their insistence that Kennedy died
before he had accomplished all that he set out to do. Therefore, it is clear that this was an opinion
shared by many around the country and even around the world. But what do the surveys have to
say about this topic? Do they agree, as the sheer number of poems on the topic seem to suggest,
that this was the most common reaction to the assassination. The surveys conducted by the
NORC, with Sheatsley and Feldmans model, come closest to answering this question. As
previously discussed above, part of the NORCs survey involves a series of seventeen very
specific statements about potential early reactions to learning of Kennedys assassination. The
interviewers asked the respondents which of these statements they identified with most, giving
them the opportunity to select multiple statements as expressing their very deepest feeling.
Felt sorry that a strong man had been killed at the height of his powers is the statement that
most closely fits the general theme discussed thus far. This was the second most popular
reaction, after felt sorry for his wife and children, with fifty-percent of people proclaiming it to
be their very deepest feeling and another thirty-six percent categorizing it as something they
felt quite deeply.37 However, many of the poems do not refer to a powerful president but a
visionary one. The word powers in the survey cannot account for the full range of opinions
about what made Kennedys early death seem so unfortunate to so many people. This example
alone reveals that even a seemingly thorough survey left out pieces of the puzzle.
Because felt sorry for his wife and children was such a strong reaction among the
surveys, one would expect to find this theme among many of the poems. Although it does occur,
its presence is relatively rare. Even in Robert S. Siegals survey of Television and the Reactions
of Schoolchildren to the Assassination, based on Sheatsley and Feldmans, which was
administered to children between the fourth and twelfth grades, 38 this selection is by far the most
frequent. Considering the fact that children are generally less informed about politics and the
34

Cartwright, Frances. "JFK Assassination was Will of God." The Chicago Defender, January 4, 1964.
http://search.proquest.com.proxy.library.vanderbilt.edu/docview/493152104?accountid=14816 (accessed February
18, 2014).
35
"Masefield Poem Honors Kennedy," New York Times, November 25, 1963,
http://search.proquest.com.proxy.library.vanderbilt.edu/docview/116703894?accountid=14816 (accessed February
18, 2014).
36
Glikes and Schwaber, 8.
37
Greenberg and Parker, 149-177.
38
Greenberg and Parker, 199-219.

Miriam Goldstein

April 25, 2014

issues that the country is facing at large, it makes sense that this would be the reaction they
would relate to most strongly. However, the poems that come from children who fall in the
same age group as those surveyed are surprisingly lacking in references to the first family. It is
possible that this is a fault of the newspaper editors, who may have received too many childrens
poems of this sort and therefore decided to publish only those by children who could think about
JFK on a deeper level. Or maybe grief for the family does not lend itself as well to poems, if
poems truly are written to express ones own feelings and desires. Indeed, when one examines
the few examples of professional poetry that do focus on the Kennedy family, it becomes clear
that despite their titles such as Jacqueline, by Will Inman, and Sonnet for John-John, by
Marvin Solomon, actually have little to do with the Camelot crew. 39 Jacqueline only
portrays the former first ladys role in either transforming the dead president into or making sure
that he remains a thing which his coffin cannot contain. And Sonnet for John-John is really
about the poets own loss of his father rather than this recent tragedy that the presidents young
son was forced to endure. Several other poems make mention of family, though not that of the
Kennedys. One, On Not Writing an Elegy, by Richard Frost, even describes a man who was
too self-involved with his divorce to be concerned with the presidents death.40 This could be a
criticism of the increasing divorce rate, which, as mentioned above, was seen as a problem that
could tear the sixties apart. Despite the fact that there were few poems written about the Kennedy
family themselves, it is clear from the poems that, as the secondary sources state, family
preservation was an issue that many people in the sixties felt was of great importance.
The compilation of poems occasioned after Kennedys assassination is called Of Poetry
and Power. Hopefully, it is now clear why such a title could not be more perfect. Poetry on the
surface, may seem rather fragile. Made up of broken lines, half-formed metaphors, and other
creatures that seem not of this world. However, underneath it all, it is truly a keeper of history.
Poetry comes from a place so deep that, buried in a warm nest, it weathers the many years that
pass it by. Poetry flies in the face of myths, and gets to the bottom of it all. Kennedy is a myth,
but poetry finds him to be a true myth. Everything that he was made up of, everything that he
was built to be whether of his own two hands or those around him was what the world
needed from him most. Kennedy the human is gone, but Kennedy the myth will live on. Through
the memories of those who were alive along with him. Through the countless books. And
through these poems.

39
40

Glikes and Schwaber, 9.

Ibid.

Miriam Goldstein

April 25, 2014

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Banta, Thomas J. The Kennedy Assassination: Early Thoughts and Emotions. The Public
Opinion Quarterly 28, no. 2 (Summer 1964): 216-224.
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1964.
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the Presidency and by the Death of John F. Kennedy. Irene Dailey and Martin Donegan,
Folkways Records FL 9721. LP, 1965
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