The tradition of individual spirit in the US has been handed down since Walt Whitman. On Independence Day, Jay Parini salutes the poets who have captured the song of America
Sparks shower a welder assembling a new stern to a scalloping vessel in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Click to see big picture. Photograph: Peter Pereira/AP
Last week, over breakfast, my teenage son looked up. "What's the point of Independence Day?" He chewed his cereal. "Shouldn't we have just stayed with England?"
I hemmed and hawed, saying that we were being taxed without representation. Of course this was one of the reasons for declaring independence from Britain in 1776, but the story is more complicated than that. In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson wrote: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." Americans were lucky to have a first-rate Enlightenment intellectual at the desk in 1876, able to put immortal words to paper. He inspired a revolution.
My son kept pressing me: "What if the US hadn't broken away from England?"
I had a quick response: "Much like Canada."
But what-ifs can't really be answered. Americans loved, and still love, their independence. And there is a natural strain of independent-minded thinking that our best writers, beginning with Walt Whitman, have always cheered. "A new Literature," wrote Whitman in Democratic Vistas (1871), "perhaps a new Metaphysics, certainly a new Poetry, are to be, in my opinion, the only sure and worthy supports and expressions of the American Democracy." Leaves of Grass, his 1851 epic which I always return to with great excitement, gives us an indication of the kind of poetry he had in mind:
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I hemmed and hawed, saying that we were being taxed without representation. Of course this was one of the reasons for declaring independence from Britain in 1776, but the story is more complicated than that. In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson wrote: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." Americans were lucky to have a first-rate Enlightenment intellectual at the desk in 1876, able to put immortal words to paper. He inspired a revolution.
My son kept pressing me: "What if the US hadn't broken away from England?"
I had a quick response: "Much like Canada."
But what-ifs can't really be answered. Americans loved, and still love, their independence. And there is a natural strain of independent-minded thinking that our best writers, beginning with Walt Whitman, have always cheered. "A new Literature," wrote Whitman in Democratic Vistas (1871), "perhaps a new Metaphysics, certainly a new Poetry, are to be, in my opinion, the only sure and worthy supports and expressions of the American Democracy." Leaves of Grass, his 1851 epic which I always return to with great excitement, gives us an indication of the kind of poetry he had in mind:
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