[originally published in: Decanally Speaking, Ivan Allen College, Georgia Tech]
As the eulogies were popping up on my smart phone on and after Dec. 29, 2024, I was stunned by the many domains with which President Jimmy Carter engaged during his lifetime. Naturally, there was much focus on his national and international activities as 39th president: energy policy, Middle East peace, diplomacy, human rights, education, and environmental conservation. Related humanitarian and peace efforts (Carter Center, election monitoring, conflict resolution, health and disease eradication, combatting poverty) also took center stage among journalists’ narratives, closely followed by his community work (Habitat for Humanity), religious leadership (Sunday school teaching, interfaith dialogue), and military service (naval officer). And there was his impressive record as the author of 32 books on politics, human rights, aging, faith, peace, family history, and other topics.
Various formal educational experiences, mostly in engineering, math, and physics, but interspersed with core courses in the humanities, at Georgia Southwestern College, Georgia Tech, and the U.S. Naval Academy were only the beginning of a lifelong desire to learn and grow. Simply put, Carter aimed for breadth or, rather, range, which is also the title of a brilliant 2021 book by David Epstein. Epstein argues in Range that those of us who explore multiple domains and develop varied skills are often better prepared to solve complex problems and excel in unpredictable environments than specialists with a narrow focus on one subject. Not unlike Roger Federer, Charles Darwin, Francis Crick, Gunpei Yokoi, Vincent Van Gogh, Igor Stravinsky, Jeff Bezos, Winston Churchill, and Harriet Tubman, all of whom Epstein adduces as ‘late specializers’ or jack-of-all-trades innovators, artists, athletes, scientists, leaders, and entrepreneurs, Carter never stopped acquiring new skills and kinds of knowledge. He was never afraid of becoming, time and time again, an amateur, a dilettante, or an enthusiast, all terms denoting the pleasure of continually and earnestly learning new things from scratch, without making them one’s profession.
One of these adventures into the pleasure of reconfiguring his life within ever-new activities and diverse forms of expression led Carter to writing poetry. He had a lifelong appreciation for enjoying poetry ever since elementary and high school, and he himself published an entire volume, Always a Reckoning and Other Poems, in1994. Like some of his autobiographical prose writings, the collection is full of personal memories about People, Places, Politics, and Private Lives, the four sections into which the 44 poems are divided. Ever humble about his writing craft, he sought advice from Arkansas poets Miller Williams and James Whitehead who, together with his family and friends, served as critics, mentors, and guides during the 1980s and early 1990s until he felt the volume was ready to publish.
In his poems, he remains true to the persona we know from his reflective prose writings: Each of the scenes or incidents reflects on an ethical dilemma. Wrestling with the racial dynamics of rural Georgia which he experienced as a boy, he learns many a helpful lesson from the friendly neighbor’s wife, but knows “that Rachel’s folks were brought … to be my people’s slaves” (“Rachel”). He reveals the transactional mindset of a local politician, who explains “The governor and state officials thank a county that will always go their way. That’s how the people get the roads and jobs” (“The County Boss Explains How It is”). And in “Life on a Killer Submarine,” he reflects on his and his fellow submariners cold war dilemma about dealing with enemy submarines:
We wanted them to understand
that we could always hear them first
and, knowing, be inclined to share
our love of solitude, our fear
that one move, threatening or wrong,
could cost us the peace we yearned to keep
and kill our hopes that they were thrilled like us
to hear the same whale’s song.
Jonathan Alter, who wrote a biography of Jimmy Carter as recently as 2020, said the 39th president was “the closest we’ve had to a Renaissance man in the presidency since Thomas Jefferson.” That’s borne out not only by the impressive range of his activities, but also by his poetry. Like the founders of Christian humanism during the Renaissance, he had two main goals with committing his thoughts to the page: becoming the best human being he could possibly be by honing the uniquely human gift of language, and telling stories that suggest that as humans we can distinguish right from wrong.
Carter’s “soft” skill as a poet offered him just another opportunity to reflect on and communicate the values that also inform his politics and policy: freedom and human dignity. As numerous responses on Amazon and Goodreads suggest, the first book of poetry by a U.S. president won over numerous readers who otherwise would not have opened the cover of a book of poems. Many of them indicate how reading the deceptively simple poems humanized and added a deeper layer of understanding to his decisions as a world leader. Just like the hundreds of Georgia Tech STEM students who flock to events at Poetry@Tech and attend classes in poetry, communication, modern languages, literary and cultural studies, history, and ethics every year, Carter understood and demonstrated that, in the words of Albert Einstein, STEM and the humanities really are “branches from the same tree.” Our students, just like the 39th U.S. President, understand that seeking a full range of core education, a holistic integration of STEM and the humanities, can lead to career success as well as a more fully ‘human’ life.