There's been grumbling in the po-biz division of the lit world about Elizabeth Alexander's inaugural poem, "Praise Song for the Day." Part of it stems from the dreaded "instant analysis" nature created by the demands of the media.

David Ulin of the Los Angeles Times, for example, was expressing his unhappiness less than 24 hours after hearing it while the bloggers were busily pounding away at the keyboard before the applause died and Alexander sat down.

Ulin labeled her language "prosaic" and felt her performance was seen as "little more than an afterthought" because the crowds drifted away before she finished.

Her placement on the program was to blame, as she followed the president and his highly anticipated address.

Adam Kirsch, blogging for the New Republic less than two hours after Alexander read, termed her poem "bureaucratic verse" because it was "spoken to no one and addressed to no one."

Kirsch, who had prepared well in advance for his appraisal by studying earlier "verses for the occasion," both ancient and recent, appreciated the artificiality of the poem's creation.

"In our democratic age, however, poets have always had scruples about exalting leaders in verse."

Added to that tradition were the short deadline and pressure of the historic moment, so obviously Alexander was facing extraordinary stress.

As Kirsch points out, "modern" poets write their verse in private and usually in response to "the truth of their own experience." Responding to a public, official event runs counter to the tradition.

Unstated, but also a factor, is Alexander's position as an African-American female in a community of mostly white male poets. In her own work, she has acknowledged her difficult role:

To realize I was trained for this,

Expected to speak out, to speak well.

To realize, my family believed

I would have words for others.

Alexander then sees her role to "speak out" and "speak well," obligations that surfaced in "Praise Song for the Day."

The title comes from the "praise song" form, an ancient African style that celebrates the life of a person in a call-and-response format.

It should have worked well for the occasion, but frequently, Alexander's images were too ordinary, her language too obviously "plain" to elevate her words to the levels a poem should reach.

More important, "Praise Song for the Day" failed to appreciate or celebrate the extraordinary nature of the event it was called upon to do.

Yet, there are passages in the poem that reflect the kind of work Alexander can do.

First, her homage to Robert Frost, the nation's first inaugural poet, appears in this stanza:

We cross dirt roads and highways that mark

the will of someone and then others who said

I need to see what's on the other side.

I know there's something better down the road.

We think immediately of "Two roads diverged in a yellow wood," the opening line of his best-known poem, "The Road Not Taken."

In electing Barack Obama, Americans have taken the "road less traveled by," and while it's too early to tell if "that has made all the difference," Alexander hopes "there's something better on the other side."

She has also captured the typical domestic scene in American homes that has taken on an air of urgency, maybe even tragedy:

"The figuring it out at kitchen tables."

That's the place where many families sit, the bills spread out in front of them, and in these days, they are trying to figure how to pay them.

Those were the lines that moved me, but in a day of many singular images, they were easily overshadowed.