During his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, Joe Biden resorted to a tactic that will be familiar to anyone who has paid attention this election cycle: He quoted some lines from the Irish poet Seamus Heaney. “History says / Don’t hope on this side of the grave / But then, once in a lifetime / The longed-for tidal wave / Of justice can rise up / And hope and history rhyme.”
A campaign ad released this week references the same lines from the chorus at the end of Heaney’s verse play “The Cure at Troy.” As a candidate inspired by poetry instead of Fox News, Biden sets himself apart from President Trump and his tweetstorms.
Biden has often turned to Heaney’s poetry to make his point. And Heaney is not the only Irish poet that he likes to quote — he has made liberal use of W.B. Yeats’s poem “Easter, 1916,” quoting from it everywhere from the Mumbai stock exchange to the Munich Conference on Security Policy. Biden is not alone in this. His old boss, President Barack Obama, was equally fond of quoting Heaney and Yeats at every possible opportunity. President Bill Clinton famously quoted the same passage from Heaney when he visited Northern Ireland in 1995, as the peace process that would lead to the Good Friday Agreement was picking up steam.
And poets are not the only ones who have been at the forefront of Democratic electoral politics in the past few years. Democratic presidential candidates Beto O’Rourke and Pete Buttigieg got into a Twitter spat about which of them was the bigger fan of James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” proving their intellectual mettle by claiming a deep knowledge of a novel famous for its difficulty.
Why has Irish literature in particular made such an impression on the Democratic Party and on educated Americans at large? Why not American poetry or African novels? Where are the casual references to other Nobel Laureates such Toni Morrison or even Bob Dylan? Biden, who has had a lifelong relationship with Irish literature, claims that he quotes Irish poets because “they’re the best poets.” While it is true Ireland has a rich history of outstanding writers whose work speaks in revealing ways to our present moment, the story of why it is so popular with certain Americans is more complicated than Biden’s simple answer lets on. The explanation lies in the middle decades of the 20th century.