17 pages • 34 minutes read
Walt WhitmanAmerica
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1888A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Historical Context
“America” is a poem of Gilded Age America. The poem is not about a country’s survival from a war that nearly destroyed it but rather its triumph over its own history. “America” reflects the buoyant optimism of the 1880s. Now distant from the brutal tragedies of the Civil War, America appeared on the verge of the historical promise that had been part of its national identity since the first generation of English settlers conceived of the shelf of settlements along the Atlantic coast as nothing less than the New Earth promised in the New Testament. “America” is the celebration of the re-starting of the American experiment, a renaissance of confidence and optimism ignited by the gaudy national celebration of the centennial of the Declaration of Independence in 1876.
In America, the 1880s were an era of economic boom, rapid urban expansion, and the birth of the industrial complex that would by the century’s end position America as a world power. The super-wealthy class began to shape American culture even as the middle class emerged into economic stability and enjoyed access to a stable public education system. The West, with the perceived threat of Indigenous populations now firmly under federal control, opened wide the gateway of opportunity even as the steady flood of European and Asian immigrants confirmed the continuing vitality of the American Dream. Cities flourished, skyscrapers began to reshape the horizon, and science turned to technology as patents were extended to, among thousands of other new inventions, the light bulb and the telephone. Cities began to network with mass transit systems. Prototypes of both the internal combustion engine and the airship signaled the threshold of a new distinctly American age. And at last the generous promise of democracy itself was beginning to be felt, imperfectly, by two segments of the population—African Americans and women—long denied access to the rights of citizenship. After the dark days of the Civil War, America had finally caught up with Whitman’s optimism and his stubborn faith in the integrity of democracy itself.
Literary Context
Whitman was certainly not the only American poet singing the praises of a country first challenged by war and then triumphing over its threat. Other patriotic hymns published in the same era included Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Paul Revere’s Ride” (1861); Julia Ward Howe’s “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” (1862); Samuel Francis Smith’s “My Country Tis of Thee” (1874); Bayard Taylor’s “National Ode” (1876); Emma Lazarus’s “The New Colossus” (1883); and Katherine Anne Bates’s “America the Beautiful” (1893). Alone of these examples of the patriotic genre that found an appreciative national audience in fin-de-siecle America, however, Whitman’s poem asks in all but words how can an American poem truly celebrate the country’s embrace of individuality and the daring spirit of innovation and invention in literary templates that were centuries old and had, in fact, been brought to the original colonies like a virus from the very nation that had for two centuries oppressed those same colonies.
The story of American literary independence emerges from the daring of Whitman’s re-conception of poetry itself. A self-educated newspaper columnist intuited that conventional (read British) poetry—tightly metered, richly allusive, elegantly phrased—had become unworkable and irrelevant within the bracing environment of the new that was postbellum America. Now in his declining years, Whitman had long championed the American right to refuse the influence of British poetry, dismissing its most accomplished poet-practitioners in America, the much-revered New England Fireside Poets, as fussy “tea-drinkers.” “America” evidences how single-handedly and against a chorus of establishment nay-sayers who dismissed his experimental line as inchoate yawping, Whitman dared to return poetry to its ancient roots: Poetry, Whitman’s every undisciplined line here testifies, speaks to and for the people.
Related Titles
By Walt Whitman
