In the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Caroline Kennedy has been turning to three poems–the one above from Homer and two excerpts from the great Greek dramatists, Sophocles and Aeschylus. All are included in the new collection she has edited, “The Best-Loved Poems of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.”
“For me that whole ancient view of the world, which has survived all this time, is a very comforting thing,” Caroline explains. But aside from memorial services and weddings, poetry has been mostly sidelined in our national life, she says. That wasn’t true in her parents’ generation. Her father’s presidency was launched by a poet (Robert Frost read a commemorative poem at the 1960 inauguration that ended “A golden age of poetry and power/Of which this noonday’s the beginning hour”). And her mother was an avid reader of poetry–and often wrote verses herself.
Caroline Kennedy has been reminded of that again in the years since Jackie’s death. “I had done a lot of work on my mother’s papers and documents–she saved every scrap–and I really wanted something to come out of that process and not just go to an archive,” Kennedy says. “After my brother died, I went back and was thinking about our childhood. Poetry played a really important role in our family, and I thought it was a wonderful thing to share with people.”
Kennedy worked on the Metropolitan Museum’s exhibit of her mother’s clothes from the White House years, which had a backdrop of Jackie’s notes and memos. But Caroline also wanted to show another side of her. “There were so many people who admire my mother and are interested in her life, but I feel like they don’t often get a chance to understand the parts of her that are really important,” she says. Doing a collection of poetry “seemed to round out the story.”
Jackie herself was immersed in poetry when she was a child. As a girl, she would visit her grandfather every Wednesday evening and they would memorize poems together. Later, at Miss Porter’s School, she won a literary prize and was awarded a two-volume collection of Edna St. Vincent Millay, which Caroline now owns. When Caroline was 3, her mother taught her to memorize that poet’s famous quatrain, “First Fig,” as a surprise for her father, the president:
Poetry continued to be central to family life. For every special occasion, Caroline writes in the introduction to the collection, she and her brother were required to write a poem or find and copy one. Then, complete with their illustrations, the poems would be pasted into a scrapbook their mother kept. It’s a tradition that Kennedy is trying to continue with her own three kids, adding to that same old scrapbook. “Having my own children now, you become so aware of being part of that continuum,” she says.
But she also wants to introduce other kids to the pleasures of poetry. “It seems like such an effort is being made to get children not just to read but to enjoy reading,” she says. “For some children, that’s an easy thing, for others it’s a real struggle. I think poetry can play a role in that.” She’s included a section of poetry just for kids, with many of her own favorites, such as “The Owl and the Pussy-Cat” and “Teddy Bears’ Picnic.” She also asked each of her children to pick some verse for the collection.
History on a larger scale plays a role in Caroline’s choices, too. Robert Frost’s inaugural poem is here, of course, as are a number that Jacqueline Kennedy selected for an “Evening of Elizabethan Music and Poetry in Honor of the Grand Duchess and Prince of Luxembourg” at the White House on April 30, 1963. That event included one of JFK’s favorites, the St. Crispin’s Day speech from Shakespeare’s “Henry V.” Jackie also introduced her husband to Tennyson’s “Ulysses”–a poem she’d memorized at age 10 with her grandfather–that the president often used in speeches (and later, Bobby as well):
Besides family favorites from e. e. cummings to Rudyard Kipling (Jackie loved “The Jungle Book” as a child), Caroline includes three of her mother’s own poems–two from girlhood, and one she wrote about Jack in 1953. If this seems like a first-time peek into a private world, it’s not. That poem, “Meanwhile in Massachusetts,” has been published before. But the backward look in time gives it an especially bittersweet tang. Here’s how it ends:
