How 'America the Beautiful' was born
KATHARINE LEE BATES, a professor of English at Wellesley College, had a chestnut-eyed collie named Hamlet and a green parrot named Polonius. She taught Shakespeare, and she wrote poetry. She loved to travel.
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She’d been to Syria. She’d toured Palestine. She’d ridden a camel in Damascus. She’d hiked the Alps. She’d even seen the Dead Sea. But Katharine Lee Bates is best remembered for a single trip she took in 1893, a pilgrimage across the United States, and for the poem she wrote about that trip. She had an eye for grandeur and for wonder, for landscape and miniature, the poet’s version of the photographer’s eye.
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She spent July 4 in the prairie, in western Kansas, eyeing its amber waves of grain. She wrote in her diary that she considered herself “a better American for such a Fourth.” The next day, she reached Colorado Springs, at the foot of the Rocky Mountains, in all their purple majesty.
She’d agreed to lecture on Chaucer for the summer, at Colorado College. She taught her course and then, near the end of July, she went on an expedition to the Garden of the Gods, where red sandstone rises out of the earth in formations that look like so many cathedral spires. She headed next to a 14,115-foot mountain called Tava, or Sun Mountain, by the Ute. “Pikes Peak or Bust,” she wrote in her diary. She boarded a horse-drawn prairie wagon: Halfway up, the driver switched out the horses for more surefooted mules.
At last, they reached the summit, a view she took in, she later said, in “one ecstatic gaze”: below, a bedspread of green pine; in the distance, peaks capped with white; above, a sky the blue of a robin’s egg. She wrote one line more in her diary that day: “Most glorious scenery I ever beheld.” That night, in her room at the Antlers Hotel, she began composing a poem.
“America, the Beautiful,” Bates’s poem, set to music, became the United States’ unofficial anthem, a hymn of love of country. There are plenty of better poems about America, the land and the people, including Walt Whitman’s “For You O Democracy,” written on the eve of the Civil War: “I will plant companionship thick as trees along all the rivers of America, / and along the shores of the great lakes, and all over the prairies, / I will make inseparable cities with their arms about each other’s necks.”
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/destinations/north-america/united-states/how-america-the-beautiful-was-born/
