In this place : (An American lyric) : autograph manuscript signed.

When Amanda Gorman stepped up to the microphone at the 2021 presidential inauguration ceremony to deliver her poem "The Hill We Climb," millions of people heard her powerful voice for the first time. But she is by no means a novice poet. In 2017, when she was nineteen, Gorman was named the first youth poet laureate of the United States by the organization Urban Word. That same year, she presented the Morgan with this manuscript of an original poem.
The manuscript includes these words: "There's a poem in this place- / in the heavy grace, / the lined face of this noble building... ." Amanda wrote those lines about the Library of Congress, where she first performed the poem, but they apply equally to the Morgan, with its venerable 1906 Tennessee pink marble building holding thousands of books that comprise, as Amanda puts it, "a palimpsest of time." But her poem is not just a celebration of venerable libraries. It challenges those who build and care for collections not only to consider whose work belongs inside but also to look beyond hallowed spaces (like the Morgan) to embrace a new American poetry-a living lyric embodied in everyday actions born of rage and hope. Echoing Walt Whitman, who told Emerson that "America is not finished, perhaps never will be," Amanda reminds us that we live in "a nation composed but not yet completed." Who will write a new American lyric? Who will be, in Whitman's words, the new "architects of These States?" Gorman's poem ends with these lines: "There's a place where this poem dwells- / it is here, it is now, in the yellow song of dawn's bell / where we write an American lyric / we are just beginning to tell."