Poems of American Patriotism

These poems capture the raw, untamed voice of American identity in its first century of existence. Brander Matthews gathered verses from the Revolutionary War through the Spanish-American War, a period when poets served as the nation's memory keepers, translating revolution, civil war, and expansion into language that could make a people see themselves. The collection includes work by Dickinson, Whitman, Longfellow, and others whose words still carry the weight of the flag-waving, cannon-fire moments that built a country. This isn't a propaganda pamphlet. It's the verse Americans turned to when they needed to remember what they were fighting for, what they had lost, and what they believed they might become. The poems possess the rough-hewn quality of a young nation still discovering its own voice, sometimes grand, sometimes mournful, always insistent on the experiment of democracy. Readers interested in the roots of American cultural consciousness will find here a time capsule of civic emotion, the kind of poetry that was once memorized by schoolchildren and recited at funerals, weddings, and Fourth of July celebrations.