BY MATTHEW HERBERT

Amanda Gorman’s transfixing recitation of her poem “The Hill We Climb” at Joe Biden’s inauguration was a literary triumph.

If you only have five and a half free minutes, please watch Gorman’s performance rather than read my attempt to praise it. Here is a link.

But if you can indulge me, I’d like describe how Gorman’s poem struck me. It was a crowning, radiant moment in American literature.

First, “The Hill We Climb” is clearly and powerfully of a piece with Walt Whitman. The hill Gorman has us struggling up is carpeted with Whitman’s leaves of grass. And just as Whitman’s cycle of nature poems was written to unite a wounded, fracturing country, Gorman’s calls us to a “glade,” where our “bruised” nation can draw new strength and “strive to forge a union of purpose.”

Also like Whitman, Gorman casts her gaze fondly over our whole landscape, to “every known nook of our nation,” and hears a hymn rising from all over the land, from “the lake-rimmed cities of the Midwestern states [and] the sun-baked South.” She has us striding out boldly, called to energetic action, but, like Whitman’s Americans, most at peace in the the pastoral, where scripture says “everyone shall sit under their own vine and fig tree, and no one shall make them afraid.”

Second, Gorman’s patriotism in “The Hill We Climb” is searing, and it is uniquely African American. I do not mean it is like “ordinary” patriotism but with a Black twist: I mean it has a depth and quality that can only be voiced by the descendants of slaves. When Gorman’s poem searches for the meaning of the American origin story, we might easily think she will find it–justifiably–in 1619, with the arrival of the first ships bearing slaves to Virginia. There is much to be said, after all, for the recent argument that 1776 was not our nation’s founding moment.

But no. Gorman indicates the unfinished project of our country started exactly where the school books say it did, in 1776–in “the windswept Northeast where our forefathers first realized revolution.”

This remarkable appeal to the Founders’ revolution by a daughter of those most brutalized by the system the Founders perpetuated is the truest form of patriotism. It is harrowed by doubt, tempered by fire, but all the more magnificent because of the severity of the tests it has passed.

In “The Fire Next Time,” one of the greatest essays in American letters, James Baldwin argued eloquently that if we Americans are to “achieve our country,” we will do so by advancing the revolution begun in Boston. And he drew this conclusion in full knowledge of how miserably we had failed to fulfill our national purpose up to that point (in 1963). For many Americans, patriotism is an untroubled, warm love of country. But Baldwin reveals that informed patriotism starts in a very cold place:

The American Negro [he wrote] has the great advantage of never having believed that collection of myths to which white Americans cling: that their ancestors were all freedom-loving heroes, that they were born in the greatest country the world has ever seen, or that Americans are invincible in battle and wise in peace, that Americans have always dealt honorably with Mexicans and Indians and all other neighbors or inferiors, . . . . Negroes know far more about white Americans than that.

But Baldwin held true to the American vision.

So does Gorman. When she exhorts us to continue the work of our revolution, she speaks from the same place as Baldwin. And Baldwin was speaking from the same place as Frederick Douglass. They all make the impassioned argument that, even knowing the worst there is to know about our history, it is still our original vision of liberty, justice and equality that we must strive for. It is not time to abandon our project and try something easier. We must achieve our country

Finally, Gorman’s use of a rapping meter to deliver her poem was artistically superb and historically significant. Jazz, gospel, and the blues are often said to be the most original American art forms. The fact that they have their roots in the historical experience of racial oppression gives them a moral vividness lacking in all other folk art. Gorman’s rapping delivery, albeit subtle, tapped into this vividness and reminded us that the experience of racial oppression continues to stimulate the most original art forms on the American scene. Whitman heard America singing; so did Amanda Gorman, even as she was singing to us.