This is not just about displays in the Smithsonian. America will never move forward, nor heal, as a society of diverse people with diverse stories, if any of its people are being silenced, ignored, ...

And make America again! *** What makes Hughes’ poem feel rather old fashioned at this late date—aside from the nationalism— may be the way the poem makes it all sound too easy.

When Francis Scott Key wrote the words “the land of the free and the home of the brave” in 1814, he did so in a poem called “The Defense of Fort McHenry.” The battle of Fort McHenry in ...

Let us all continue in 2018 to write the unwritten poems about the soul of America. Let us carry out with courage the truth of who we are with humility and wisdom; with strength and compassion.

T he proclamation “I contain multitudes” waves like a banner in Walt Whitman’s poem “Song of Myself.” One of the great American bards, Whitman grasped the essential importance of bigness and variety ...

He wants it to be a unifying force. "I completely believe poetry is a realm of ecstatic freedom," he says, on the phone from Miami, where he's teaching a seminar at the Miami Book Fair.