America

The poem lays out its argument in reader-friendly diction and without the labored elements of stylistic flair and decorative linguistic touches typical of poetry of Whitman’s era. The poem rejects the studied verbal dexterity of rhythm and rhyme, finding within the conversational immediacy of free verse a way to connect with the American masses, the lifeblood of American democracy. The poem does not read like a poem, does not scan like a poem. In this, the poem sings free of the oppressive constructs and predictable formulas of European (read British) poetics. It is an American poem celebrating American uniqueness in a distinctly American voice. Interestingly, “America” is the only Whitman poem the poet himself recorded, although only the first four lines, on a wax cylinder just months before his death.

But what exactly are the elements of the American experiment? Just over a century after the American Revolution, that experiment was still being defined and refined. Two elements are crucial to Whitman’s hymn: Americans’ similarity and their tradition of freedom, that is, how alike Americans are despite their rich diversity, and how they all theoretically enjoy a kind of freedom—social, political, economic, and religious—unprecedented in the annals of human (read European) history.

Whitman certainly does not pretend that Americans are a cookie-cutter race all cut from the same cultural background and hence interchangeable parts of the national machinery. Like many of the Transcendentalists still surviving into the latter decades of the 19th century, Whitman was alarmed over the increasingly mechanized American culture, the sprawl of industrial complexes and factories in urban centers, impersonal environments that threatened to reduce the individual and to create an unsettling feeling of people losing their sense of individuality within such forbidding sprawl. Thus, Whitman here emphasizes even within the limited confines of a six-line poem the rich diversity of the American population. Rich, poor, male, female, young, old, fair, strong, feeble: Americans, in committing to the collective enterprise of the American experiment, have never abandoned their defining individuality. Unlike more traditional catalogues from Whitman’s earlier verse that relied on luxurious lists of nouns, Whitman underscores America’s richness by offering here a list of broad and grand adjectives only, refusing to anchor any of them to nouns and thus making them applicable to everyone. That very variety, the poem argues, defines Americans.

Mindful of the catastrophe of the Civil War, Whitman links that sense of American unity-through-diversity to the American embrace of responsible freedom. Whitman hardly advocates anarchy or the frenzied energy of mob rule. Democracy respects the individual and expects the individual to exercise limited freedoms in ways that create and sustain the nation that guarantees that freedom. To its “Equal daughters, equal sons” (Line 1), America offers the opportunity to find the way to prosperity and community. Whitman was no inattentive optimist, no idealist. His affirmation of freedom is grounded in his own memories. A nurse during the height of the Civil War, Whitman had seen terrifyingly up-close the implications of a people who forget their common identity, who surrender to anarchy and chaos, who abandon the common-sense logic of national community. Whitman offers to his nation (that in 1888 was just emerging from the war fought to resist the fracturing of the Union and to end the sin of slavery) the reminder that freedom works only when it works for “all” (Line 2).

It is an exhilarating, even ambitious poem. Despite its brevity, or perhaps because of it, and perhaps because this poem was among the last original poems that Whitman would write, there is an urgency to a poem that seems otherwise serene, confident, and assertive. The country cannot afford to forget its history; Whitman himself was running out of time. Given his self-appointed role as the Poet of Democracy, he offers this reminder that America works only as long as Americans all work together and that America thrives only when all Americans thrive. He offers no caveat to dim the celebration here, but implicit in his ode to American equality and freedom is the unspoken reminder of the trauma inevitable if the nation forgets its own identity and forsakes its own mission.