In my course, I start out with the typical literary periods--Romanticism, Realism/ Naturalism, Modernism, then we read novels by an African American (Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye), contemporary Native American (Sherman Alexie), Canadian (still American?--Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale), and what I see as a critique of white man as victim, I guess (Palahniuk's Fight Club).
In any case, one of the questions on the first day questionnaire is "What is American literature?" I invite students to think about this broadly, and--more specifically--to apply it to three poems: Richard Blanco's "One Today", Robert Frost's "The Gift Outright," and Langston Hughes' "Let America Be America Again." My objective with having them read and respond to these poems is at least two-fold: one, to discuss what makes literature distinctly "American" and to point out that it is complicated and fraught (and perhaps to work together to find some questions/ issues we can apply to other things we read over the course of the semester); two, to see how well they do analyzing something relatively short and straightforward.
Other poems could be used, but I chose these three poems to provide 3 different viewpoints. Blanco wrote and recited his poem for Obama's second inaugural address. He was the first immigrant, first Latino, and first openly gay poet to be named Poet Laureate of the United States. His poems is optimistic, hopeful. Obviously his definition of America includes diversity, not just racially or ethnically, but in the types of work people do, etc. His poem echoes Whitman's "I Hear America Singing."
Frost's poem is more ambiguous: the "gift outright" is America itself, the land/ geography. Like Blanco, he recited the poem for an inauguration, in his case JFK in 1961. He had written another poem, but the glare of the sun made it difficult for him to read (he was 87 at the time), so he recited "The Gift Outright" from memory. In Frost’s poem, the “we” he includes are white settlers from Europe. In many ways the poem can be read as an expression of “manifest destiny,” the belief held by American colonists (and throughout American history) that God pre-ordained white settlers to spread across the land (and perhaps some whites feel that lofty position threatened today?). The dark side of that, of course, is that Native Americans were already here, and already had art, stories, creation myths, etc., that Frost ignores. So, the type of American identity that Frost expresses may be quite a bit different than what Blanco expresses. After all, Blanco was the first openly gay inaugural poet, and his parents fled Cuba and he was born in Spain. The unity that Blanco expresses no doubt includes people of different cultures, ethnicities, and sexual orientations.
Despite this, there’s an attempt in both Blanco and Frost to tie the literal facts of existence to larger spiritual/poetic forces. Also, the endings of both poems suggest that we are continuing to define what “America” might mean…that it’s an un-ending task. I think this is important in terms of an American lit. class because—at this point—literature is fragmented in so many directions that it’s impossible to pin down what a truly “American” literature might be.
I'm not trying to leave Hughes out of my exposition here. I've started my American lit classes for the last 3 or 4 times with this exercise. I added Hughes poem last semester, both to include an African American voice, and just to add more complexity to the overall idea of what "America" might mean. I like using the Hughes poem because it exposes the darker side of life, the illusion of the "American dream," but it ends on a hopeful note, that America as an ideal is still possible.
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