TEXT: Whitman, “I Hear America Singing” (1860)
- Eleven line free verse poem added to the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass in a section entitled, “Chants Democratic”
- Whitman identifies multiple occupations across the emerging industrial American order: mechanics, carpenters, masons, boatmen, deckhands, shoemakers, hatters, wood-cutters, ploughboys, mothers, wives, sewing women, and washer women
CONTEXT: Urbanization
Industry pulled ever more Americans into cities. Manufacturing needed the labor pool and the infrastructure. America’s urban population increased sevenfold in the half century after the Civil War. Soon the United States had more large cities than any country in the world. The 1920 U.S. census revealed that, for the first time, a majority of Americans lived in urban areas. Much of that urban growth came from the millions of immigrants pouring into the nation. Between 1870 and 1920, over twenty-five million immigrants arrived in the United States. —American Yawp, Chapter 18, Section III
SUBTEXT: Every Day Lyrics
- Why might Whitman have included some occupations and some groups but not others?
- What does “the day belongs to the day” mean, and why did Whitman choose to end his poem celebrating the “party of young fellows, robust, friendly” who offered “their strong melodious songs” in the evening?
METHODS CENTER —Research Journals
- Understand that research has setbacks and dead ends