ABSTRACT
When Robert Frost and Maya Angelou each recited poetry for a presidential inauguration ceremony—Frost for John F. Kennedy in January of 1961 and Angelou for William J. Clinton in January of 1993—both were playing the role of rhapsode. If both Frost and Angelou were inaugural rhapsodes, it is only Angelou, would argue, who should be described as a racial rhapsode. The difference between these nonracial and racial rhapsodes is present despite the fundamental thematic similarity of their two inaugural poems, Frost's "The Gift Outright" and Angelou's "On the Pulse of Morning." In depicting response to a oral/aural performance, Angelou's poem imagines listeners equivalent to her own audience at the inaugural ceremony. An audience that, rather than looking backward upon the prior sacrifice of veterans, instead looks outward upon a group of living contemporaries, a group made recognizable by their identities—their racial, ethnic, religious, class, and professional identities.
