Poetry is the art of truth-telling and it takes many forms. Oratorical rhetoric seeks simply to persuade. Whilst there can be no doubt that Obama and his speechwriters have learned many lessons from poetry - most notably the way they boiled down of big ideas into a pithy, accessible and inspiring speech - to suggest that the inauguration speech itself was poetry is simply ludicrous.

I wrote this poem the morning of Barack Obama's election victory, awake at 5.30 a.m. and almost as euphoric as I was when Labour came to power in 1997. We'll see what happens next, but let's hope that Obama is worthy of all the adulation that's been poured his way, and able to float above it.