Could Obama's speech be called poetry? Yes, it could

But could it truly be termed "poetry"? If, as Gerard Manley Hopkins once suggested, poetry is "the common language heightened", then President Obama (how I loved typing that phrase for the first time) became a poet in his speech. He made the language itself resonate; and he did so not by fancy writing or superficially elevated diction or self-conscious parallelism in the syntax. Anyone who rereads the speech closely will see that he used only the simplest of words: "new", "nation", "now", "generation", "common", "courage", "world". And he spoke these words in straightforward cadences that have already become familiar, drawing them out to exactly the right length.....

But as Obama spoke, as when any poet reads a wonderful and true poem, the listener became the words. Speaker and audience responded as one. It was all performance, and yet it was a genuine form of poetry: pure, simple, and direct. The winds of history, of course, blew hard at the president's back, lifting his words across the expanse Washington and the world beyond. He had to say very little to say a lot. But - like all good poets – he understood what little needed to be said, and how much this fragment of language mattered to a world in desperate need, at that very hour, of these exact words.