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Each year on the Fourth of July I write a book review appropriate to the themes of the day. The book this year is "The Heart of American Poetry" (2022) by Edward Hirsch, published by the Library of America. Hirsch is both a poet and a tireless advocate for poetry. He aims in this book to increase appreciation of American accomplishment in this art, an accomplishment which often is undervalued or overlooked. The book consists of forty poems by as many American poets ranging over a 400 year period. The poems are arranged chronologically by birth date of the poet, beginning with Anne Bradstreet (1612 -- 1672) and her poem "The Author to Her Book" and concluding with "Rabbit is Up to Tricks", a poem by Joy Harjo (b. 1951). An essay by Hirsch accompanies each poem.
At the close of "The Heart of American Poetry" Hirsch says: "This is a book that I've been preparing to write for much of my life, and I'm grateful to the Library of America for proposing it to coincide with its fortieth anniversary." The book opens with Hirsch's essay "The Introduction of a Poet". Hirsch describes his early life is the child of working class parents in Chicago and of his determination to become a poet. The book throughout has a strongly personal, introspective tone, as Hirsch writes: "This is a personal book about American poetry, but I hope it is more than a personal selection. I have chosen forty poems from our extensive archive and songbook that have been meaningful to me, part of my affective life, my critical consideration, but I have also tried to be cognizant of the changing playbook in American poetry, which is not fixed but fluctuating, ever in flow, and to pay attention to the wider consideration, the appreciable reach of our literature."
Hirsch identifies some of the themes and sources of American poetry over its long course. Broadly, the poems celebrate America and its promise of freedom and equality from a variety of perspectives.
So too, the poetry is critical of the many ways the United States has fallen short and continues to fall short in the realization of its ideals. The poems reflect American diversity through time, with familiar and unfamiliar writers, and multitudinous voices, including Puritans, women, Indians, African Americans,Jewish people, intellectuals and factory workers, blues singers, and much more. Each poem offers a view of America, its hopes, dreams and failings. In his Introduction, Hirsch points out that American poetry can be read horizontally and vertically. Horizontal poems show the speaker in relation to others, including family and society. Vertical poems show the speaker alone with self and considering his or her relationship to spiritual concerns and to God.
Hirsch's essays accompanying each poem add to the book a great deal. The essays describe Hirsch's experience with each poet and offer a consideration of the poet's work and life. He discusses each poem on a line-by-line basis with a discussion of metaphor, verse form, structure, and rhthym and other elements of poetic art. The essays generally conclude with a brief summary describing what the poet was about and the significance of the poet's work. The essays will add to the reader's appreciation, regardless of the familiarity or its lack he or she may bring to poetry.
The Nineteenth Century Poets discussed in the book include Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, and Emma Lazarus. The Twentieth Century witnessed a broad flowering of American poetry which is still under-appreciated. I have a special fondness for two American poets, Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane, who are included in this volume with insightful discussions from Hirsch. Stevens is represented by the meditative poem "Sunday Morning" while Crane is represented by "To Brooklyn Bridge" from his long poem "The Bridge". Both poems are special to me in the way they combine secularity with religious feeling. Crane's difficult, visionary poem offers a sense of meaning and purpose in America and its history through love and freedom in the face of the difficulties of an apparently materialistic age. As a New Yorker, Hirsch recalls his experiences crossing back and forth over the Brooklyn Bridge. He writes of Hart Crane and his answer to the pessimism of T.S. Elliot's "The Waste Land":
"The first time I crossed Brooklyn Bridge I didn't feel at all as if death had undone so many. On the contrary, the place seemed filled with life. Now looking up at the cables of the bridge which soar over the water, I recall how Crane countered modern pessimism with a renewed hope in the American city. He held fast to the American story and celebrated our modernity. I believe that his work makes a promise to the future. I try to remember that promise when I feel disheartened about our country. All you need to do is to head over to Brooklyn Bridge to remember its grandeur."
I found "The Heart of American Poetry" a moving and fitting way to think about our country on Independence Day. In difficult times, readers may experience a sense of the issues facing our country together with a sense of hope.
