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Even when the speech is over, the references to Abraham Lincoln will keep coming. The first course of lunch will be served on china that is a replica of the crockery of the Lincoln presidency. The menu has been inspired by the food that Lincoln enjoyed as a child in Kentucky and Indiana.

But it is the speech in which the echoes will be most clearly heard. The President-elect cited Lincoln repeatedly during his campaign and has said that he has been reading the inaugural addresses of 1861 and 1865 in preparation. The likely mood is caught in the concluding words to Lincoln's second Inaugural in 1865: “With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right ... let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds.”

Most inaugural speeches disappear as soon as they are delivered. In reaching for profundity, mediocre writers hit a platitude. Dwight D. Eisenhower went for a numbered list. Warren G. Harding was so dull that, as H.L. Mencken said, “a sort of grandeur creeps into it”. Some presidents have been interesting at the cost of being comical. George H. W. Bush compared freedom to a kite. Richard Nixon really did say that “the American dream does not come to those who fall asleep”.

It takes a certain skill to hit a false note like that. Most inaugurals are well constructed, cleverly written but lack a governing idea. Bill Clinton's are a case in point. The inaugural speeches that last - those that are quoted decades later - are those that define a moment in history.

There is no exception to the rule that good writing with no argument to serve will not last. Lincoln is still quoted - and the same is true of Roosevelt and Kennedy - because their inaugural speech reunited the people after an election, confronted the serious issues of the day and began to set out a way forward. Just as every good poem has to have an argument, so does every good speech need a point. Lincoln did it better than anyone. In his first inaugural he summarises the predicament of a nation in a single sentence: “Plainly the central idea of secession is the essence of anarchy.”

Whether President-elect Obama can define the state of the nation in a resonant phrase will be the test of his inaugural speech. That is a very high barrier to set. But Barack Obama has consciously put himself in the company of the best, not least by the train ride from Philadelphia to Washington, a deliberate re-enactment of the ride that Lincoln took in 1861.

The modern inaugural speech, with the world looking on, is so much bigger than it was. Inaugural speeches in the 19th century were mainly disquisitions on the Constitution. It is only more recently that the speech was addressed to the American people. Now it is beamed out to the rest of the world. Both the subject matter and the audience is global.

The requirement to have a serious argument will suit Barack Obama as one of his objectives will be to dampen the excessive expectation that his rise has done so much to fuel. He gains the presidency at a time when there is a great deal to be serious about. But no matter what is in the script, the best part of the occasion will be that which is seen and therefore does not need saying. One hundred years ago President William Taft reminded the nation that “The negroes are now Americans”. It needed saying then.