Jimmy Carter, Presidential Poet

President Jimmy Carter passed away today at 100. In 1995, he became the first president to publish a collection of poems in his lifetime: Always a Reckoning and Other Poems. Aside from John Quincy Adams’s epic poem, it is the only poetry book published by a living president.

I intended to feature multiple selections by Carter in Poems by Presidents: The First-Ever Anthology, which was published by Dover Publications last year. That wasn’t feasible due to practical obstacles, but I still discussed Carter extensively in an appendix.

His interest in poetry began in childhood. His eighth-grade English teacher had her students memorize famous poems and write their own verse. When Carter was in the Navy, he spent days at a time on a submarine and composed poems to pass the time. He penned love poems for his wife, Rosalynn, and wrote about happenings on the vessel.

Always a Reckoning and Other Poems features both free verse and rhyming poems. In addition to a haiku about Mount Fuji, a quatrain about war, and a sonnet about Carter’s hometown of Plains, Georgia, selections discuss peanuts, Rosalynn, a submarine, and the universe. His modus operandi can be found in the poem “Itinerant Songsters Visit Our Village”: “I learned from poetry that art/is best derived from artless things.” That is to say he draws on real life.

The bonus material webpage for Poems by Presidents directs readers to eight poems by Carter. Readers can listen to Carter read “Rachel” and “The Pasture Gate” and watch him recite “Considering the Void.”

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