The tradition of individual spirit in the US has been handed down since Walt Whitman. On Independence Day, Jay Parini salutes the poets who have captured the song of America

Last week, over breakfast, my teenage son looked up. "What's the point of Independence Day?" He chewed his cereal. "Shouldn't we have just stayed with England?"

I hemmed and hawed, saying that we were being taxed without representation. Of course this was one of the reasons for declaring independence from Britain in 1776, but the story is more complicated than that. In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson wrote: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." Americans were lucky to have a first-rate Enlightenment intellectual at the desk in 1876, able to put immortal words to paper. He inspired a revolution.

My son kept pressing me: "What if the US hadn't broken away from England?"

I had a quick response: "Much like Canada."

But what-ifs can't really be answered. Americans loved, and still love, their independence. And there is a natural strain of independent-minded thinking that our best writers, beginning with Walt Whitman, have always cheered. "A new Literature," wrote Whitman in Democratic Vistas (1871), "perhaps a new Metaphysics, certainly a new Poetry, are to be, in my opinion, the only sure and worthy supports and expressions of the American Democracy." Leaves of Grass, his 1851 epic which I always return to with great excitement, gives us an indication of the kind of poetry he had in mind:

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 deck

hand 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 morn

ing, or at the 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 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.

Whitman catalogued the democratic vistas that opened before him with freely-flowing rhythms which stick in the head. This was a new kind of poetry, and not one that would easily be found in the British Isles until the 20th century. Even then, it must be said that British poetry has been tighter, more emotionally controlled, more tied to the rueful ironies of Hardy and Larkin or the intense lyricism of early Auden or Ted Hughes than Whitman's expansive style, which has continued to play out in many of the best American poets.

Take our new US poet laureate, Charles Wright. His work owes a good deal to Whitman as well as Ezra Pound. He writes in an easy, episodic style, connecting the natural world with the world of the spirit with astounding freshness. In Arkansas Traveller, for instance, we hear the rhythms and repetitions, the sense of nature connecting with spirit, that reaches back to Whitman:

On the far side of the water, high on a sand bar,

Grandfathers are lolling above the Arkansas River,



Guitars in their laps, cloth caps like Cagney down over their eyes.

A woman is strumming a banjo.

Another adjusts her bow tie

And boiled shirtwaist.

And in the half-light the frogs begin from their sleep

To ascend into darkness,

The insect choir

Offering its clear soprano

Out of the vaulted gum trees into the stained glass of the sky.

On this American day of independence, I salute our poets, who have found a voice for our spiky form of democracy. Through them, we hear America singing.