Although generalizations based on nationality are always mistaken, the temptation to make them is too strong to resist. Henry James praised Americans for their "accessibility to experience," and his generalization seems even more persuasive today than when he formulated it. It seems that Americans will go anywhere to discover something new, or new to them—to our own backwaters, ghettoes, and dives, to remote and unpopulated regions of the globe, and even to the old country of Europe. For literature this has meant that American poetry is more replete with "information" than the poetry of Europe; it is more specific about places, dates and facts of all kinds. Much of the European poetic tradition is taken up with the astute rearrangement of certain timeless literary "counters" drawn from classical mythology and literature. The activities of gods and goddesses stand for development within the psyche. More usual for American poetry (at least, after Whitman) is the writing of poems about your own city, your own backyard—and, as a result, the circumstances of your own life. Autobiographical elements come into European poetry in many great instances—Dante, Shakespeare's sonnets, Wordsworth's Preludes, lyrics by Hugo and Baudelaire, and Hardy's elegies. But America has gone further than these earlier examples, even to transgressive lengths by presenting personal situations and emotions that the decorum of other traditions would have proscribed in previous eras. In the interest of truth and authenticity, American poetry has risked shock, embarrassment, and even banality, as poets recorded an undisguised account of their experience.

The quintessence of American poetry is, finally freedom. Freedom to say anything, however indecorous; freedom to break rules and experiment; freedom to follow the rules of European prosody with absolute rigor, if moved to do so. I know of one American poet who has made himself, by dint of study and residence in England, a reckonable contemporary English poet. In doing so he is only the more American, free to change his aesthetic nationality in keeping with internal prompting. And he may cite a notable predecessor in T.S. Eliot, who eventually changed his legal citizenship as well, in order to catch up with the spiritual site his aesthetic had already attained.

It is nevertheless true that a few American poets have adapted their country and its democratic traditions into a myth they could use for their poems. Whitman, Williams, Crane, and Langston Hughes belong to this line, and I confess to a special affection for their example. With each of them, the national myth takes on more depth and solidity and becomes the basis for a confidence and a forward-looking direction for our energies. That is another way of saying that these poets help us to see that our experience, national or private, is valuable and not something we ought to despise. Poetry might do things equally important, but what greater thing can it do for us than that?