I Hear America Singing

First published in 1860 ironically to a nation edging into the dark cannibal logic of civil war, Walt Whitman’s “I Hear America Singing” celebrates the can-do work ethic and the complex diversity of a vast nation just beginning to realize its potential as a single thriving community. The volume of poems in which “I Hear America Singing” was in, titled simply Leaves of Grass, with its thematic boldness, its loving use of American topics, its irreverent and spacious sense of verse freed from the restrictions of anticipated rhyme and rhythm, became for the new generation of American poets born after the War of 1812 their Declaration-at-Long-Last of Independence. Everything about Whitman’s 11-line poem defied the conventions of poetry American writers had inherited from England, models that the generation of national poets before Whitman, dubbed the Fireside Poets, tried so valiantly, and so deliberately, to mimic. “I Hear America Singing” did not look like a British poem, did not read like a British poem, did not scan like a British poem—and happily, defiantly it did not want to. Indeed, with the emergence of Whitman in the decade leading up to the Civil War, America found its first truly native