I Hear America Singing

Two events are critical to the historical context of “I Hear America Singing”: Transcendentalism and the Civil War.

The first is an influence that Whitman readily admitted: the rise of New England Transcendentalism and particularly the motivational arguments of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Whitman attended a lecture Emerson delivered in New York in 1842. He had been deeply moved by Emerson’s radical essay titled simply “The Poet,” which called for a new kind of poet for a new kind of nation. The initial volume of Leaves of Grass, published un-ironically on Independence Day, celebrated the unbounded energy of the American imagination as Emerson argued American poets needed to do. Without that context, Walter Whitman, failed everything, would most likely never have evolved into Walt Whitman, America’s Poet. In “I Hear America Singing,” Whitman’s poetic lines are wonderfully irregular, their rhymes and rhythms subtle and unforced, its temperament undeniably bold and inviting, its themes accessible and clarion-clear, its optimism palpable, all reflecting the influence of Emerson.

On a more sobering note, unlike the earlier editions of Leaves of Grass, the volume in which “I Hear America Singing” (1860) appears was necessarily informed against Whitman’s helpless recognition that the nation whose community and collective energy his poem celebrated was, even as the poem was being read in the teeming streets of New York and Boston, coming apart.