The Liberty to Study Poetry

From The Hearth

July 3, 2026

“I must study politics and war, that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy… in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.

John Adams, letter to Abigail Adams, May 12, 1780

About the Author

John Adams (1735–1826) was a farmer’s son from Braintree, Massachusetts, who became a lawyer, a leading voice for American independence, and the second President of the United States. He was stubborn, honest, and often unpopular for it — he once defended the British soldiers of the Boston Massacre in court because he believed every man deserved a fair trial, and he counted it among the most principled things he ever did. He spent long, lonely years in Europe as a diplomat, negotiating the treaties and loans that kept a fragile new nation alive, separated by an ocean from Abigail, the wife he adored and to whom he wrote some of the most tender and searching letters in American history. In one of history’s quiet wonders, he died on the Fourth of July, 1826 — the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration he had fought so hard to bring about — within hours of his friend and rival Thomas Jefferson.

Historical Context

He wrote these words from Paris in the spring of 1780, in the middle of a war whose outcome no one yet knew. Walking the galleries and palaces of Europe — surrounded by paintings, music, sculpture, all the refinements of old and settled nations — Adams felt the ache of a man doing grim, unglamorous work far from home. And he made peace with it by seeing his labor as a link in a chain. He would spend his one life on politics and war — the hard, thankless foundation — so that his sons could build on it with science and reason, so that their children, his grandchildren, might finally be free to give their days to beauty. He would never sit in the shade of the tree he was planting. He planted it anyway.

Scripture Cross-Links

Psalm 78:4–6 — “We will not hide them from their children, shewing to the generation to come the praises of the Lord… that the generation to come might know them, even the children which should be born.” The psalmist and the statesman share one instinct: to labor now for a generation not yet born, so that what is good is not lost between them.

Proverbs 13:22 — “A good man leaveth an inheritance to his children’s children.” The truest inheritance Adams had in mind was not land or money but liberty — and the settled peace in which to enjoy the finer things of the soul.

Doctrine and Covenants 128:15 — “They without us cannot be made perfect — neither can we without our dead be made perfect.” Here is the deepest form of Adams’s chain: the generations are bound together, each one incomplete without the others, each one laboring across time on behalf of those before and those still to come.

Thematic Reflection

There is a particular kind of love that plants trees whose shade it will never feel. It is not the love that wants to be thanked, because most of the people it serves have not yet been born. Adams names three generations in a single breath — his own, his sons’, his grandchildren’s — and assigns himself the least glamorous part: the war, the politics, the foundation no one admires and everyone stands on. He trusts that if he does the hard thing well, someone he will never meet will one day have the freedom to study poetry. That is faith of a very practical kind — the willingness to spend your one life laying stones for a house you will not live in, believing your children’s children will.

Grandfather’s Counsel

My dear ones, I want you to notice what Adams was really doing, because I am doing a smaller version of the very same thing right now. This book is, in its own quiet way, my politics and war — the labor of an ordinary man who wants his grandchildren to inherit something finer than he was handed. I will not always be at the table with you. But if I do this well, you will have in your hands the distilled things I most wanted you to know — about faith, about kindness, about the God who loves you — so that your days can be freer and fuller than mine. So here is my counsel: receive what those before you paid for, and never imagine you built the table you were born at. And then turn and do the same — spend some part of your life on the unglamorous foundation, so that your grandchildren may one day study poetry. That is how love travels down a family. It labors for people it will never see. In my life my parents provided me with a home and education. My grandfather purchased stock in Central Bank that was passed down to my mom, then me, and very well may be passed down to you. My grandfather passed down property that helped provide a down payment on a home. I never met this grandfather, yet his hard work made my life a little easier. I hope you will continue to pass it forward.

Lessons from Patients

In thirty years of medicine, I learned that when people come near the end, their thoughts almost never turn to themselves. Again and again, at the bedsides of the dying, I watched the conversation turn — not to what they had accumulated, but to what they were leaving, and to whom. A man with very little would spend his last clear afternoon making sure his grandchildren would be all right. That is Adams’s letter written in a different hand: the human heart, at its most honest, is forward-looking and generous, laboring to the very last for a generation it is about to leave behind.

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