“It is an amazing poem. It claims that we represent, not war and conquest, but freedom, enlightenment, and compassion.”

“America is, as we were all taught in elementary school, a melting pot. There are no countries named in this poem, there are no religious groups named in this poem. The speaker is a kind of everyman . . .”

“Whitman’s poem closes the gap between poet and reader. The poet’s speaker asserts his identity through physicality. I, too, received identity by my body and the crowd on the ferry soon becomes everyone who has ever traveled, anyone who has ever gone home, anyone who will ever go home.”

“She drives into her poem at an unexpected angle—exits without explanation. She gives the reader ample space to expand and elaborate on her intentions. This is stubborn, backcountry matter—predators and prey.”

“. . . the poem speaks into the future in this way, using the text message form, which just seems like such an American thing to do—to kind of think forward into the future but also into the past, speaking through Tituba, who happened to be the first person who died in the Salem Witch Trials.”

“And what I am particularly struck by is how, so early in our country’s history, he is making, or trying to make, a space for difference by showing how much we have in common, mainly, the need for love, the need for company and companionship, whoever we are.”

“This poem is about history and identity in that it is about, as Jon Anderson says, the ‘last important victory’ of the tribes, for the tribes, and also about living in history.”

“He took the legal story of Amelia, which no doubt went on for pages and pages and pages, and he eliminated anything that was not necessary to experience the event.”

“Just because my mother didn’t throw shoes at me—her weapon of choice was the hairbrush—and wouldn’t have called them zapatos if she had, doesn’t mean I can’t relate.”

“A tireless suffragist and abolitionist, Harper saw the transformation of this country from a land of inequality to a place of promise and hope.”

“And the sheer compassion of Longfellow’s vision suffuses the poem with an emotion, an emotional music that is quite powerful. And that is what makes this poem matter most to me personally: the strange beauty and evocative power of its language and its imagery that draw a special resonance from Jewish cultural history.”

“Hillman . . . reminds us that one of the functions of art is to disturb: to startle us out of the ossified, inflexible forms of the routine and conventional. In this, she has a particularly American genius.”

“Still, yet, for a woman writing from the middle of the 1800s, a woman who rarely ventured from her father’s house, the self-claiming in this and so many of her poems is extraordinary, and strikes me as quintessentially American, at least as Americans dream themselves to be.”

“Harryette Mullen oftentimes engages language as a kind of a plaything, but is always aware that it’s volatile, like somebody juggling nitroglycerin.”

“So Williams gives us a kind of diagnosis of a situation in America in 1923 (and America afterwards as well), and a kind of solution: we need contact with the earth.”

“I think ‘The Bridge’ is saying something about American identity and what it means to be an individual within a work in progress, which is what any nation or coalition or relationship is, and what it means to be an artist in this culture, fully alive to the complexities and disappointments and possibilities of what that might mean.”

“John Wieners’ poems are the means by which he rescues himself. The poems relieve his anguish as they offer rhythm in the ritual of writing…”

“For him, migration is a mode and means of identification with others, and so, of self-discovery.”

“The poem, aside from being fascinating and brilliant, perhaps a great poem, is illustrative also, in its way, of the huge wave of immigration coming from southern and eastern Europe at the turn of the last century …”

“While her experimentation was cosmopolitan, and her range of reference global and century-spanning, her idiom was of the folk.”

“The Civil War remains the most cataclysmic and tragic event in our history. Behind the struggle, driving its purpose and passions, loomed the greatest of issues: the fate of a country and the rights of its people.”

“ … he seems like he’s locked into some very narrow thing, namely the self, but in truth, it gets very large and wide thanks to his great use of language, and his love of language, and the rhythm …”

“The poem is a litany of community-summoning and blessing. It holds an album of lives, and of longings, recognized and unrecognized both.”

“… in this poem, she’s putting the story of a broken people back together; she’s making a road home, maybe even cleaning the road home for the people, for the person in this story who’s been broken, and for her own brokenness and the brokenness of a whole country.”