Tess Taylor on Joe Biden's Win

At CNN, Tess Taylor recalls the way it felt to realize, as the presidential election votes were counted, what it will mean to have a president who references literature, again. "And then, just in the moments before Pennsylvania went blue, one piece of talk caught my ear, and got my heart leaping, again," Taylor writes. "I was surprised by how much it suddenly mattered." More: 

 It wasn't policy. It wasn't history. It was a list of the authors Joe Biden loves, among them Irish poet Seamus Heaney, who Biden quotes often, and the Greek dramatist Aeschylus, and the African American poets Langston Hughes and Robert Hayden. Joe Biden values these voices.

Just then, Pennsylvania got called, and people around me turned their attention to honking their horns in the streets. Dancers danced, musicians played, kids blew whistles and people sounded, as Walt Whitman once did, a few barbaric yawps. And all through the day, I felt a private dawning wonder: We are going to have a president who loves literature (and a vice president who sings the praises of novelists as diverse as Toni Morrison, C.S. Lewis and Richard Wright). We are going to have a president who quotes poetry.

Continue reading at CNN.