Like yesterday’s poem, “The Man Born to Farming,” Katherine Lee Bates’ “Pikes Peak” (better known as the song “America the Beautiful”) evokes pastoral pride. The poem was inspired by the sights Bates had seen on a train ride to and from Colorado Springs, especially by the vista she beheld from the top of Pikes Peak.
Last year, the essayist, poet, novelist, and farmer Wendell Berry delivered the 2012 Jefferson Lecture for the National Endowment for the Humanities. At the time, David Skinner, editor of Humanities Magazine, wrote that Berry “is the sum of his beliefs. . . . Instead of being at odds with his conscience, he is at odds with his times. Cheerful in dissent, he writes to document and defend what is … Read more »
First published in 1923, “The Red Wheelbarrow” is one of those poems that most students encounter at some point in their educational career, and it’s worth returning to thereafter. At eight lines and just 16 words long, the poem is short and seemingly simple, and yet through its carefully arranged sounds and striking imagery it lends itself to endless interpretation.
A sestina is a structured poem consisting of six stanzas of six lines each, followed by a final three-line stanza, for a total of 39 lines in the poem. The end-words of the first stanza are used, in a set pattern, to end lines in the remaining five stanzas. For example, if the first line of the poem ends in the word “peace,” “peace” will be used to end the … Read more »
In yesterday’s poem, Carl Sandburg described the “Stormy, husky, brawling, / City of the Big Shoulders” city of Chicago. Today, we look at another part of America: the redwood forests that inhabit northern California, seemingly from time eternal. Before reading Dana Gioia’s “Becoming a Redwood,” though, explore this photo gallery of redwood trees to better imagine the portrait that Gioia paints.
First appearing in Poetry in 1914, Carl Sandburg’s poem “Chicago”—the first of nine poems he wrote about the city in his 1916 collection Chicago Poems—describes the “City of the Big Shoulders” that Sandburg loves, despite its imperfections. Sandburg had moved to the city in 1912, just two years before writing the poem, and the poem is an early example of social realism, a form of art that became … Read more »
In Friday’s poem, Billy Collins compared the picture postcard to a sonnet. Today’s poem, Stephen Vincent Benèt’s “American Names,” celebrates American place-names as poems in and of themselves. The poem also examines the differences in association between “the sharp names that never get fat” of American towns compared with the “silver spoons” of European cities.
This week, our poetry selections have explored “singing” the American experience. Today’s poem also takes up this subject, though from a different vantage point. In “American Sonnet,” Billy Collins compares the traditional Italian or English sonnet to a postcard, which he describes as “a poem on vacation, / that forces us to sing our songs in little rooms / or pour our sentiments into measuring cups.”
Forty-five years ago today, on April 4, 1968, while standing on the balcony of his hotel room in Memphis, Tennessee, the civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was shot and killed. Just the previous day, he had delivered his famous “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” address at the Bishop Charles Mason Temple Church of God. Today’s poem, Maya Angelou’s “Caged Bird,” explores the quest for freedom and … Read more »
In declaring that “I, Too, Sing America,” Langston Hughes raises the question of how we as Americans should relate to one another. (In the poem, Hughes likens America to a kind of family, where he is the “darker brother,” at the moment outcast but eventually included: “Besides, They’ll see how beautiful I am / And be ashamed.”) In today’s poem, “Mending Wall,” Robert Frost also … Read more »
Distinguished scholar-teachers Amy and Leon Kass demonstrate how short stories, speeches, and songs can be used to enhance civic education and how a pedagogical approach that stresses learning through inquiry can make primary sources come alive for students of all ages.
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“What a wonderful collection of American songs, speeches, and stories. It should be valuable for teachers, students, parents, and readers of all kinds.”
— Diane Ravitch