America

Whitman was nearly 70 when he composed “America,” meaning he had seen his nation evolve, triumph, flounder, and then recover. This poem is therefore largely about America’s resiliency.

The poem measures America against time itself. Even as Whitman faced a catalogue of physical challenges as he neared his own death, the poem projects a rosy future that Whitman, who now had a physical disability due to a stroke, knew was not to be for him. The poem, however, offers a kind of immortality to a poet facing mortality. I am an American, the poet argues, I cannot be entirely defined without factoring in that identity. As America endures, so will I. The poet, ever the Transcendentalist, sings of America’s resilience as “[p]erennial with the Earth” (Line 4).

It may seem presumptuous for a poet to declare his nation perennial with the Earth when that country was barely a century old. It may seem optimistic to project that after a scant handful of decades America was destined to endure in perpetuity. Whitman was no innocent idealist. He was by training and profession a journalist. Whitman was aware of America’s vulnerabilities, its moral failings. Yet Whitman, flush with pride in how the American experiment had survived against greater odds than a less generous God might have given it, asserts that resiliency aware of how the nation had already been tested in its brief life span by economic downturns, the moral depravity of slavery, a string of less than impressive presidents, the illegal confiscation of Indigenous lands, and supremely by the schism of a civil war.