I’ve always been interested in these poems. They certainly underscores what a profoundly bizarre person the POTUS is.
It also is an indictment of what passes for poetry today.
It’s what HL Mencken said about President Harding’s speeches, that captures it best:
It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.
Or as William Allen White put it...
They’re like an army of words marching across the landscape in search of an idea, and having found one, they triumphantly bear it back home where it is worked to death.