Titans , were really robber barons......

    

Katharine’s heart was also brimming with patriotism of the deepest and truest kind. The critic for The Nation pronounced Bates “A lover of national themes who has learned to treat them sanely.” Her sensible passion for her native land animates her earliest poems. America’s gifts, she once observed, were “the least of her wealth”; this nation was clearly “Something more/ Than cloud-enfolded hills or foam-lit shore,/ Or steepled towns.” Her ability to distill that “something more” gave us the glory of “America the Beautiful”.

The America that Katharine Lee Bates inhabited and chronicled in 1893 was an energetic, optimistic country, throbbing with conflicting forces. The widespread industrialization that pushed the country from coast to coast, from farms to factories, from small family businesses to colossal corporations, was creating perplexing new problems. The enormous wealth of some was offset by the growing poverty of many. To some, the titans of American development—John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, J.P. Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt, among others—were really robber barons, exploiting the country and its people.

The main themes of “America the Beautiful” were the ones Bates had explored all her life: the wonder of nature; the vitality of our nation; its treasured heritage and infinite potential for the future—all cast in a poetic majesty, in an ambiance of deep idealism. “The heart must outsoar the hand,” she was fond of saying, and that idealism is enforced in each verse of her great poem: an opening celebration of the goodness of America, followed by a brief prayer, and finally a challenge to make something better:

“O beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain…”

The poem begins with a deep sense of gratitude for the gifts of nature, deftly framing the spectacular images of her trip west with her New England consciousness.

“America! America! God shed his grace on thee…”

This is the prayer of a woman who belonged to no church, who early in her life rebelled against religious dogma. She was not given to outward shows of piety.   Her faith remained deep, but private. But she was comfortable invoking God’s grace—as long as it remained clear that that grace was universal, non-sectarian, and truly as all-inclusive, as spacious as the skies above.

“And crown thy good with brotherhood, from sea to shining sea.”