The Best Loved Poems of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
   Selected & introduced by Caroline Kennedy
   (Associate Writer & Reviewer - Dr. Alma Bond)
  2001 Hyperion
    ISBN: 0786868090


Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis loved literature, especially poetry. “Once you can express yourself,” she wrote, “you can tell the world what you want from it. All the changes in the world, for good or evil, were first brought about by words.”

Now, Caroline Kennedy shares her mother's favorite poems & the words behind her strong belief in the power of literature. The poems represented span the centuries & include works by such renowned authors as Langston Hughes, William Shakespeare, Homer, W.B. Yeats, Emily Dickinson, e e cummings, & Robert Frost. The volume also includes poems by Jacqueline Kennedy.

Associate Reviewer Dr. Alma Bond writes:

It is no news to Americans that Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis was a wonderful woman; just how wonderful becomes clear in reading her daughter Caroline's testimonial to her beloved mother.

Truly a Renaissance woman, Mrs. Onassis was well-informed in many areas, including poetry, literature, the French language, music, ballet, art, horseback riding, travel, & architecture. Her expertise in so many fields made her an extremely popular game player among her family & friends, particularly in Charades.

She was also a wonderful mother. As an example, for holidays such as Christmas & birthdays, she requested that her children not spend money, but make original gifts themselves. One requirement was that each child choose, memorize, & copy a poem for these occasions. The results were placed in a scrap book, which became an object of great value to the family, & from which Caroline selected many of the poems in this book. In an amusing anecdote, Caroline said that she & John were competitive as to which one chose the better (& longer) poem.

Mrs. Onassis' erudite interests are apparent in this book. It includes poetry about America, adventure, escape, whimsy, romance & love, & reflection.

I found the section on America both touching & appropriate in these post-September 11th days, especially in its resurgence of patriotism. When we hear a poem or song repeatedly, it often tends to become automatic & lose its meaning. It was good to really hear Katherine Lee Bates' America the Beautiful, with its beautiful & timely message:

        “Oh beautiful for heroes proved,
        Thine alabaster cities gleam
        Undimmed by human tears!”

Jackie is dead now, but if she were compiling a book for these times, she couldn't have done better than to include Emily Dickinson's Hope is the Thing with Feathers. Perhaps we should all carry a feather around with us, along with the American flag:

        “Hope is the thing with feathers
        That perches in the soul,
        And sings the tune without the words,
        And never stops at all.”

Jacqueline Kennedy was also a devotee of civil rights, & is still fighting for her beliefs in this lovely book. I particularly like Countee Cullen's Tableau:

        “Locked arm in arm they cross the way,
        The black boy and the white,
        The golden splendor of the day,
        The sable pride of night.”

Included in the collection is Rose Kennedy's favorite, Paul Revere's Ride by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, which as every school child knows, begins with:

        “Listen, my children, and you shall hear
        Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere.”

Caroline informs us that the senior Mrs. Kennedy had memorized the poem, & forced her family to sit through her recital of it at many family occasions. Perhaps the younger Kennedys can be forgiven if they failed to appreciate the poem in its later renditions.

It was nostalgic to be reminded of much-loved poems. I had forgotten how moving Edgar Allan Poe's Annabelle Lee was to me as an adolescent. It made me cry this time, too:

        “And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
        Of my darling, -- my darling -- my life and my bride,
        In her sepulchre there by the sea--
        In her tomb by the sounding sea.”

Many other old favorites are included. A few of them such as She Walks in Beauty Like the Night by George Gordon, Lord Byron, surely could have been written for Mrs. Onassis herself:

        “She walks in beauty like the night
        Of cloudless climes and starry skies,
        and all that's best of dark and bright
        Meet in her aspect and her eyes.”

And my lifelong preference, Sea-Fever, by John Masefield! Some poems mold your thinking, so that you are never the same after you have read them. Sea-Fever so influenced my life & thoughts that to the present day I can't live anywhere but on the ocean:

        “And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
        And the flung spray and the blown spume and the sea-gulls crying.”

Of course many poems by Shakespeare were selected, such as one of my most read sonnets, #CXV1. Presumably, Mrs. Kennedy applied its philosophy to her relationship with the late president:

        “Let me not to the marriage of true minds
        Admit impediments. Love is not love
        Which alters when it alteration finds.”

But best of all to me is the poem she wrote about Jack Kennedy, Meanwhile in Massachusetts. Caroline said she hesitated to put her mother's poem in a book composed of great poetry, in my opinion the poem is not only very moving but stands on its own as historical poetry. It also gives us a fascinating glimpse into the soul of a private woman:

        “But now he was here with the wind and the sea
        And all the things he was going to be.”

It seems we can add poet to Mrs. Onassis' list of accomplishments.

Other poems included are by: Walt Whitman; Jean Toomer; Edna St. Vincent Millay; Carl Sandburg; Robert Louis Stevenson; Jimmy Kennedy; Arthur Guiterman; Theodore Roethke; Mary Austin; Hilaire Belloc; Vachel Lindsay; Winifred Welles; John Clare; Edward Lear; Lewis Carroll; Christina Rossetti; Alfred Noyes; William Carlos Williams; Clement Clarke Moore; Rudyard Kipling; John Donne; Alfred Lord Tennyson; Constantine P. Cavafy; Elizabeth Bishop; William Butler Yeats; Samuel Taylor Coleridge; Wallace Stevens; Sir Philip Sidney; Christopher Marlowe; Sir Walter Raleigh; Rupert Brooke; Chang Wu-chien; Daniel Lawrence Kelleher; St. Francis of Assisi; John Milton; Percy Bysshe Shelley; Sophocles; Aeschylus; Pindar; T.P. Cameron Wilson; Siegfried Sassoon & Stephen Spender.

The book is further enriched by many hitherto unknown photographs of the Kennedy family & by Caroline's moving comments about growing up with Jackie for a mother. Surely the finest possible testimonial to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis's greatness is this beautiful memorial by her daughter. Whoever could have asked for a more gracious, elegant, erudite First Lady? And whoever could have asked for a better mother? This book intimates that the daughter is worthy of the mother.

More from Caroline Kennedy: The Right to Privacy & In Our Defense: The Bill of Rights in Action
(11/04/01)

Dr. Alma Bond
2001©Alma Bond
A RebeccasReads.Com Sr. Associate Reviewer

A RebeccasReads author featured in Authors & Books

Reviewer's Bio:
Dr. Alma Halbert Bond is the author of ten published books, including:
The Deadly Jigsaw Puzzle;
The Tree That Could Fly;
Tales Of Psychology (2004);
I Married Dr. Jekyll And Woke Up Mrs. Hyde (2000);
The Autobiography Of Maria Callas, A Novel (1998);
On Becoming A Grandparent: A Diary of Family Discovery (1994);
Who Killed Virginia Woolf? A Psychobiography (1998);
Profiles of Key West (1996).

She recently recorded her new manuscript, Old Age Is A Terminal Illness, as an audio book.

She is also the author of a just published children's picture book called The Tree That Could Fly.

Dr. Bond teaches Psychology & Writing online at WriterSchool.