By Marjory Wentworth, poet laureate of South Carolina | I am guessing there won’t be a poem at this week’s presidential inauguration. Too bad, because now is the time to think like a poet.

Through empathy, precise language and imagery, poets connect us to the things of this world and to one another. No one understood this better than the late Winston Churchill, who hand-wrote his speeches in iambic pentameter. This five stress line of verse is essentially the length of the average sentence written in the English language and can be said in one breath. Churchill had to inspire a nation under attack, and he accomplished this in ways that will be remembered forever.