Not that anyone would give a damn. The nation little noted nor long remembered Miller Williams' effort on behalf of fellow Arkansan Bill Clinton four years ago. So little an impression did James Dickey of Georgia make on Jimmy Carter's big day that I now think that I must have hallucinated that poetic episode, that it didn't happen at all.

My second, more considered, response is that the incoming administration can be charged with squandering an opportunity to signal, if only symbolically, some sort of commitment to culture and the arts. It would be a way to mend fences. But then perhaps you need to have a certain kind of president to make that happen. Think of Robert Frost reciting "The Gift Outright" from memory at JFK's Inauguration on Jan. 20, 1961. How remarkable that was, and, in the 40 years since, it has acquired ever greater significance as a sort of cultural statement, a conjunction of poetry and power at the height of the Cold War: the aged Frost reciting a poem affirming America's manifest destiny while the dashing young president exhorted idealists and patriots to ask what they could do for their country.

The unkind may say that there's as much difference in quality between Kennedy and Clinton as there is between Frost and Maya Angelou, who read "On the Pulse of Morning" on Jan. 20, 1993. But it is equally true that Angelou's eight-minute-long ode to democratic egalitarianism set some sort of record for the best-attended poetry reading of the decade.

Is it degrading to poetry as an art to choose an inaugural poet on political grounds? Arguably, but that would disown a whole genre. Does it offend aesthetes that the chief criterion for the position be suitableness as a role model? No doubt. Still, in picking Angelou Clinton scored a bull's eye. "On the Pulse of Morning" -- in which she rhymes "Greek" and "sheik," "Jew" and "Sioux" -- was popular, she read it with conviction and she inspired people who had not previously identified themselves with poetry but were about to do so in a big way.

Angelou's performance was in fact a major cultural event with profound implications. When Janet Jackson, playing against Tupac Shakur in the movie "Poetic Justice" (1993), writes poems, it is Angelou's poems that she writes, which I cite as evidence not only of Angelou's personal ascendancy but of the newfound prestige enjoyed by American poetry in the era of competitive slams and the "spoken word," of poems performed like rap songs and poetry festivals celebrated earnestly on TV documentaries.

Within half a year of Angelou's ode the nation had a new poet laureate, also a black woman, Rita Dove, the first of a trio of activist poets laureate who took the job to heart and sought to enlarge the audience for American poetry. And it has grown larger. While at the end of the 1980s articles lamenting the imminent death of poetry were common, no one today would entertain so spurious a supposition.

Is it facile to connect the fortunes of American poetry in the largest sense with the partisan nature of the federal government? Maybe, maybe not, but Clinton did set a tone or a mood in 1993, and Bush could have taken a chance on finding a poet who wouldn't use the occasion to denounce him. But I wondered whom the Republicans could have asked and who might have accepted, and then I reminded myself how closely poets tend to identify themselves with the Democratic Party -- all the more so now, after the bitterness of an election in which the candidate with the greater intellectual stature was defeated, perhaps in part because of his intellectual stature.

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"