As I Walk These Broad Majestic Days

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

Perhaps the most familiar of Whitman’s pre-Civil War patriotic poems, here the poet emerges, much as in “As I Walk,” as a kind of visionary prophet speaking on behalf of Americans earnestly, happily dedicated to their work and seeing in their pursuit of labor a spiritual elevation. In both poems, however, Whitman treats less the topic at hand—working, in one case, and the resurgence of America after the war in the other—and more centers the poet—Walt Whitman, American Poet—as the crucial energy in the nation’s evolution.

“The New Colossus” by Emma Lazarus (1883)

Originally written as a sort of fundraiser for the newly arrived Statue of Liberty in New York harbor (the poem is now on a plaque at the base of the statue), this sonnet embodies the same soaring optimism that defined the Gilded Age in Whitman’s own perception of an America on the rise. If Whitman celebrates the growth of cities and the boom in factories, Lazarus reminds the nation that such American environments rely on the dedication, diligence, and sweat of the immigrant working class. As with Whitman, Lazarus celebrates not the mighty and the powerful but rather extols the heroic energies, and the spiritual and emotional restlessness, of the great and wide reach of working-class (immigrant) America.