What I heard brought me a comparison similar to yours to Whitman and his sweeping portrait of America as the landscapes and people that make it. My reaction was to think of Carl Sandburg, and the subtle legacy his work plays through Barack Obama’s life.

The man who interviewed Obama for his position as a community organizer in Chicago, asked the younger President what he know about the city. His answer: “Hog Butcher for the World”, the first line of Sandburg’s ‘Chicago’.

Sandburg was rooted in Chicago and Illinois, as Obama soon would be, and moreover they shared a love of Lincoln and his dreams (expressed far better than I could in this brief article [PDF]. But more than that, and more than for Whitman, Sandburg’s deep connectedness to the people of his city and land evokes a care towards the pains of life’s industry in a way that is deeply felt in Obama’s writings:

I AM the people — the mob — the crowd — the mass.
Do you know that all the great work of the world is done through me?
I am the workingman, the inventor, the maker of the world’s food and clothes.

I’ve always felt the poem ‘Chicago’ itself encompasses Obama’s rise, the confidence and overconfidence that is nevertheless part of his appeal:

Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with white teeth,
Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young man laughs,
Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has never lost a battle,
Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse. and under his ribs the heart of the people,
Laughing!

Like Sandburg, Blanco brings out the full weight of work in peoples’ lives, those of both his fellow citizens and his parents who worked so that he might succeed:

Silver trucks heavy with oil or paper—
bricks or milk, teeming over highways alongside us,
on our way to clean tables, read ledgers, or save lives—
to teach geometry, or ring-up groceries as my mother did
for twenty years, so I could write this poem.

And so Blanco’s poem captures Obama’s call to work together as past generations worked for us, to look back at them in inspiration and forward to what we can achieve. In Obama’s words: “We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths — that all of us are created equal — is the star that guides us still.”

In Blanco’s:

And always one moon
like a silent drum tapping on every rooftop
and every window, of one country—all of us—
facing the stars
hope—a new constellation
waiting for us to map it,
waiting for us to name it—together.

And in Sandburg’s:

In the night, and overhead a shovel of stars for keeps, the
people march:
“Where to? what next?”

For all, a star-spangled banner stretches across the centuries.

(Photo: Carl Sandburg quote, photographed by Billy Hathorn, via Wiki.)