Tomorrow is World Poetry Day. What more appropriate time, then, to reflect on the role poetry plays in our national life?

There have been many great Australian poets, beloved by the public (if not always by the academy), Henry Lawson, Dorothea Mackellar, Judith Wright, A D Hope, Clive James, David Malouf and Les Murray among them. I have a soft spot for Banjo Paterson, the romantic balladeer of the bush. (I once got into trouble for reading his poetry during a dreary Senate estimates evening.)

John F Kennedy understood the power of poetry and often punctuated speeches with quotes from much-loved verse.Credit:AP

Yet our rich poetic tradition has had little impact upon our political life, whether in platform rhetoric or parliamentary debate. Which is strange because what the political orator and the poet both seek to do is distil an idea or an image into words both moving and, at their greatest, immortal.

In other countries, great political oratory is often enriched by verse.

In America, the Kennedys were particularly keen on blending oratory and poetry. JFK’s inaugural speech quoted from the Book of Isaiah. On the night Martin Luther King was shot, Robert Kennedy recalled the anguish of his own brother’s assassination by invoking Aeschylus: “And even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget/ Falls drop by drop upon the heart/ Until in our own despair, against our will/ Comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”

Ronald Reagan brought his most moving speech – the address to the nation following the death of the Challenger astronauts – to a perfect finish with words from John Gillespie Magee’s poem High Flight: “And so they slipped the surly bonds of earth/To touch the face of God.”

Australian poets (from left) Judith Wright, Clive James, Dorothea Mackellar and Les Murray.Credit:

In Britain, Churchill’s great wartime speeches clearly echo the cadences of Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome, which he had memorised as a schoolboy. Margaret Thatcher quoted the prayer of St Francis of Assisi as she first entered Downing Street in 1979.

A small number of Australian political figures have turned to poetry for pleasure, comfort and inspiration.