The most famous Christmas poem in history is not just 28 rhyming couplets of innocuous anapestic tetrameter, writes Alexandra Socarides in the LA Review of Books:

It’s hard to read the poem as anything other than a utopian, feel-good fantasy of holiday giving and magical surprise, written, as the story above tells us, by a father for the entertainment of his family. ...

I’m not saying that, just because Clement Moore had what I consider to be abhorrent politics, we shouldn’t read this poem to a whole new generation of Santa Claus–crazy children. What I am saying is that once you know about them, it’s hard not to see them all over the poem.