America

“I Hear America Singing” by Walt Whitman (1860)

An early and enthusiastic expression of Whitman’s fierce advocacy of the American experience, this poem can be compared to “America,” an expression more tempered by the experience of the Civil War. The enthusiasm may be moderated but the same sort of celebration of the one-forged-by-the-many defines Whitman’s lifelong perception of the value of the American experiment.

“National Ode” by Bayard Taylor (1876)

The defining expression of the nation’s Bicentennial, in fact read during the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the poem, elegant and carefully developed, is exactly what Whitman rejected: a celebration of America through the formal strictures of rhythm and rhyme inherited from the very country from which America had declared its independence.

“America” by Allen Ginsberg (1956)

To understand Whitman’s position as American’s Poet of Democracy, a comparison to one of Whitman’s most enthusiastic Postmodern admirers can help illuminate (or perhaps deflate) Whitman’s resolute optimism. Ginsberg takes the same position of the poet as a public functionary and uses the free verse form as satire to excoriate America for its failure to live up to the ideals of its own inception, its lapse into moral complacency, and its appetite for material reward.