“America” is a poem of Gilded Age America. The poem is not about a country’s survival from a war that nearly destroyed it but rather its triumph over its own history. “America” reflects the buoyant optimism of the 1880s. Now distant from the brutal tragedies of the Civil War, America appeared on the verge of the historical promise that had been part of its national identity since the first generation of English settlers conceived of the shelf of settlements along the Atlantic coast as nothing less than the New Earth promised in the New Testament. “America” is the celebration of the re-starting of the American experiment, a renaissance of confidence and optimism ignited by the gaudy national celebration of the centennial of the Declaration of Independence in 1876.

In America, the 1880s were an era of economic boom, rapid urban expansion, and the birth of the industrial complex that would by the century’s end position America as a world power. The super-wealthy class began to shape American culture even as the middle class emerged into economic stability and enjoyed access to a stable public education system. The West, with the perceived threat of Indigenous populations now firmly under federal control, opened wide the gateway of opportunity even as the steady flood of European and Asian immigrants confirmed the continuing vitality of the American Dream.