SOURCE: Kerkering, Jack. “‘Of Me and of Mine’: The Music of Racial Identity in Whitman and Lanier, Dvořák and DuBois.” American Literature 73, no. 1 (March 2002): 147-84.

In the following essay, Kerkering compares the American Centennial-era poetry of Sidney Lanier and Walt Whitman, noting significant contrasts in form, structure, voice, and historic vision.

With Reconstruction entering its tenth year in 1875, plans were underway in Philadelphia for a gala event to mark the following year's national centennial. Opening ceremonies would feature a choral cantata with music by Northerner Dudley Buck and words by Southerner and former Confederate soldier and poet Sidney Lanier. This collaboration between North and South was deliberately meant to symbolize the national unity that Reconstruction had so far failed to restore.¹ Lanier's poem “The Centennial Meditation of Columbia,” or the Centennial Cantata, asserts national continuity by personifying America as a single entity, the goddess Columbia, whose declaration...