17 pages • 34 minutes read
Walt WhitmanA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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.
By Walt Whitman
A Glimpse
A Glimpse
Walt Whitman
A Noiseless Patient Spider
A Noiseless Patient Spider
Walt Whitman
Are you the new person drawn toward me?
Are you the new person drawn toward me?
Walt Whitman
As I Walk These Broad Majestic Days
As I Walk These Broad Majestic Days
Walt Whitman
Crossing Brooklyn Ferry
Crossing Brooklyn Ferry
Walt Whitman
For You O Democracy
For You O Democracy
Walt Whitman
Hours Continuing Long
Hours Continuing Long
Walt Whitman
I Hear America Singing
I Hear America Singing
Walt Whitman
I Sing the Body Electric
I Sing the Body Electric
Walt Whitman
I Sit and Look Out
I Sit and Look Out
Walt Whitman
Leaves of Grass
Leaves of Grass
Walt Whitman
O Captain! My Captain!
O Captain! My Captain!
Walt Whitman
Song of Myself
Song of Myself
Walt Whitman
Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night
Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night
Walt Whitman
When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer
When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer
Walt Whitman
When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd
When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd
Walt Whitman