Fifty Shades of America: 50 of the best poems about America

The Land of the Free, the Home of the Brave. This illustrious phrase encapsulates the aspirations of America and its people.
In this volume we feature 50 American poets beginning with the Colonist Anne Bradstreet in the 17th century, when American poetry was entirely rooted in its parental British forms. From here our classic poets take us through Centuries of history, through Independence and expansion Westward, across the cities and vast landscapes of their words. Along the journey we also meet the Imagists, the poets from the Harlem Renaissance by way of the Transcendentalists and the Fireside Poets.

The giants of the poetic way loom large; Walt Whitman. Emily Dickinson, Edgar Allan Poe, Paul Laurence Dunbar and Edna St Vincent Millay. Our rambling poetic stroll gives voice to the nation’s hopes, its dreams, its failings, its musings.

We cannot hope to define America but we do provide the many changing moods and flavours of the times as we discover the essence of its soul.

1 - Fifty Shades of America - An Introduction

2 - A Nation's Strength by Ralph Waldo Emerson

3 - America by Herman Melville

4 - The New Colossus by Emma Lazarus

5 - America the Beautiful by Katharine Lee Bates

6 - Brothers. American Drama by James Weldon Johnson

7 - We Wear the Mask by Paul Laurence Dunbar

8 - The Negro Speaks of Rivers by Langston Hughes

9 - Abraham Lincoln by James Russell Lowell

10 - Paul Revere's Ride (The Landlord's Tale) by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

11 - England and America by Florence T Holt

12 - Americanisation by G K Chesterton

13 - In Amsterdam by Eugene Field

14 - Broadway, New York, July 1916 by George Sterling

15 - New York at Night by Amy Lowell

16 - Harlem by Langston Hughes

17 - The Natives of America by Ann Plato

18 - An Indian Summer Day On the Prairie by Vachel Lindsay

19 - Pray To What Earth Does This Sweet Cold Belong by Henry David Thoreau

20 - Hymn To The North Star by William Cullen Bryant

21 - An Hymn To the Evening by Phillis Wheatley

22 - Trees by Joyce Kilmer

23 - from Song of Myself by Walt Whitman

24 - Sonnet 12 by Alan Seeger

25 - The Ancient Arteries of America by Daniel Sheehan

26 - A Crowded Trolley Car by Elinor Wylie

27 - The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost

28 - Yes, I Have a Thousand Tongues by Stephen Crane

29 - Thirteen Ways of Looking At a Blackbird by Wallace Stevens

30 - The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe

31 - Wild Nights, Wild Nights by Emily Dickinson

32 - Comment by Dorothy Parker

33 - To My Dear and Loving Husband by Anne Bradstreet

34 - The Boy She Used To Know by Damon Runyon

35 - Portrait D'une Femme by Ezra Pound

36 - Sonnet 18 - I, Being Born a Woman by Edna St Vincent Millay

37 - Evening Song by Willa Cather

38 - I Hear America Singing by Walt Whitman

39 - The Crowd at the Ball Game by William Carlos Williams

40 - It Couldn't Be Done by Edgar Albert Guest

41 - Hope is the Thing With Feathers by Emily Dickinson

42 - Colored Hats from Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein

43 - Solitude by Ella Wheeler Wilcox

44 - Sympathy by Paul Laurence Dunbar

45 - Chaplinesque by Hart Crane

46 - The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver by Edna St Vincent Millay

47 - Whispers of Immortality by T S Eliot

48 - A Grave by Edith Wharton

49 - Bury Me In a Free Land by Frances E W Harper

50 - To the Memory of the Americans Who Fell at Eutaw by Philip Freneau

51 - Star Spangled Banner by Francis Scott Kay