![]() ![]() Your symptoms of creeping privilege disappeared.īiden might have claimed Yeats as well. ![]() You carried your own burden and very soon President Barack Obama presents the Medal of Freedom to Vice-President Joe Biden in January 2017 (Image: Olivier Douliery-Pool/Getty Images)īiden, not surprisingly, quoted Heaney during his own remarks, but this time drew from the poem "From the Republic of Conscience" as he praised Obama for his humility. And I’m history.”īiden has since invoked “hope and history” while serving as vice president, in his acceptance speech for the Democratic nomination in August 2020, in a widely seen campaign video from 2020, when presenting a National Humanities Medal last fall to Elton John, and even in last month's reception marking the Persian new year.Īt the end of the Obama administration, when the president awarded Biden a Medal of Freedom, Obama joked that he was going to quote Yeats - because “Seamus Heaney is taken.” In his 2017 memoir “Promise Me, Dad,” Biden remembered Ashley's response when Obama choose him as the vice presidential candidate: “Dad, this is hope and history.” Biden answered with a joke: “Oh, great. “I believe with every fiber of my being," Biden concluded, "we have a chance to make hope and history rhyme."īiden biographer Evan Osnos says that by 2008 he had already quoted “The Cure at Troy” so frequently his daughter Ashley would tease him. He listed Heaney as his preferred “contemporary” Irish bard, and referred to Heaney's words from “The Cure at Troy," saying he believed they were reflected in “the sentiments and hearts of the vast majority of the American people.” In a speech early in his own campaign, Biden observed that he liked to quote Irish poets because they are “the best poets."Ģ008 Presidential election candidate Senator Joe Biden at the Democratic National Committee Winter Meeting in Washington, DC, February 2007 (Image: Jamie Rose/Getty Images) Presidents have long made a point of citing a favorite writer, and for Biden that often has been Heaney, renowned for what Nobel judges in 1995 called “works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth." Besides his original poems, his noted works include a bestselling translation of the Old English epic “Beowulf" and his play “The Cure at Troy,” a verse adaptation of Sophocles' “Philoctetes,” with Heaney's inspirational alliteration about a time when “hope and history rhyme.”īiden's affinity for Heaney dates back at least to an earlier presidential run in 2008, when he lost the nomination to Barack Obama and eventually became his running mate. ![]() To get the best of Irish history, culture, and folklore sent straight to your inbox, sign up for our FREE newsletter. “Yeats and Heaney encompass so much of the universal catalog of emotions poetry can express and they are the major wells he (Biden) goes to when he needs the perfect words to encapsulate a feeling.” “I think that's a safe guess to make,” says former Biden speechwriter Dan Cluchey, who worked with the president from 2018-2022. You can also count on Biden to quote an Irish poet or two, especially two late Nobel laureates - Seamus Heaney and William Butler Yeats. When President Joe Biden visits Ireland this week, he will mark the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, confer with top officials on current issues, and honor his Irish ancestors. ![]()
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