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.
Themes
The Resiliency of 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. In all but words, the poem argues, if America survived those challenges, what could conceivably stop it now? Grounded in a belief in freedom, the rule of law, and the empathetic concern for each other, America cannot be denied longevity and prosperity.
The Celebration of Democracy
The poem celebrates not America the country but rather America as a manifestation of an idea that had never served as the foundational concept of a nation: government of the people, by the people, and for the people. The word itself—from the Greek, “demos” (people) and “kratos” (power)—had existed for three millennia but only as an idea as cultures, even civilizations, one after another accepted as a given the arbitrary rule of the privileged few. And although America had its share of problems, Whitman’s poem never diminishes the implications of an experiment that invested the rights and privileges of power to the masses, dismissed since Athenians in Antiquity coined the term. The great unwashed mob required constant control, and it thrived only when it was ignored by those who shaped the destiny of nations and cultures and, in the process, reaped the rewards of the diligence and work ethic of the underclass.
Whitman understands the radical concept of democracy, a nation of “equal daughters, equal sons” (Line 1). Whitman refuses to allow that concept to thin into cliché. He centers the poem on his unironic celebration of a nation where all citizens are “alike” despite their diversity. Whitman uses the poem to remind his America, enjoying historically unprecedented economic prosperity and beginning to conceive of itself as an international power, to never forget this is the idea that drives the American experiment. Forget that concept of one union created by the many—“strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich” (Line 3)—Whitman tacitly argues to a country just beginning to emerge from the hard memories of the Civil War, and you will once again stumble, fall into division and violence.
This sense of a shared humanity reflects Whitman’s own philosophical embrace of Transcendentalism, which restlessly explored how the apparent differences in organic objects masked the true shared spiritual dimension that made the cosmos itself a single, grand, living organism.
The Public Role of the Poet
According to the once-expected public role of the poet, poets have a function. The concept might be curious to a contemporary reader. In an era of Instagram poets, digital readings, and e-zines, where important and unimportant information vies for attention (and where information reaches audiences in short bursts to hold attention), Whitman’s poem affirms a concept all but lost: the critical role played by the poet in the public life of their era. For Whitman, poetry was not the forum for vivisecting personal joys and sorrows, the agonies and ironies of the poet’s private life. Rather, Whitman here appropriates the role of Poet, capital P, and offers to his nation a message that is at once intensely personal and yet consciously public. There is no doubt, given the extensive writings Whitman published extoling the virtues of a democratic America, that Whitman here voices his own enthusiastic affirmation of the resilience of America. And that affirmation is tendered as a public proclamation.
Whitman, despite his revolutionary formal experiments in free verse, allied himself with the defining poetic voices of his own era, most notably the widely popular Fireside Poets, the cabal of New England poets that included Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose works were read in front rooms (hence the moniker) as well as recited in schoolrooms. Like these poets, Whitman perceived poetry as an opportunity to use verse itself to inspire a culture, to speak for a nation. In addressing the United States as a “grand, sane, towering, seated Mother” (Line 5), Whitman speaks for his era of appreciative Americans, grateful for their nation and aware of its complex identity and vested in its future. In this forum, the poet performs a public function, the poem designed not so much for sustained silent reading or classroom exegesis as for gaudy and showy public performance, for the spectacle pomp and circumstance of recitation.
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By Walt Whitman
