Whitman's catalog poem finds the nation's music not in capitols or cathedrals but in working people — carpenters, masons, boatmen, shoemakers, mothers, seamstresses — each singing 'what belongs to him or her and to none else,' many voices making one chorus without ceasing to be individual voices.
What it is contested on. Whitman's expansive embrace had real limits — his recorded views on race were often ugly, a jarring gap between the poet of democracy and the man in his time. The poem also sings a working America while omitting the enslaved workers whose labor built much of it; Douglass, three entries up, supplies what Whitman leaves out.
Public domain: published before 1931
This copy: Project Gutenberg #1322, Leaves of Grass; the poem only. source · 157 words
I Hear America Singing
I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,
Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong,
The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam,
The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work,
The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat, the deckhand
singing on the steamboat deck,
The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench, the hatter singing as
he stands,
The wood-cutter’s song, the ploughboy’s on his way in the morning,
or at noon intermission or at sundown,
The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work,
or of the girl sewing or washing,
Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else,
The day what belongs to the day--at night the party of young
fellows, robust, friendly,
Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs.
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