Poetry and American Memory

The poet laureate reflects on what makes the American people "a people"—and what our poetry can teach us about the "fragile, heroic enterprise of remembering."

Who do we Americans think we are? This is a cultural question, and it is worth asking: many of the great issues in American public life are ultimately cultural issues. The relation of the well-off to the poor; the meaning and the future of race and ethnicity; the degree to and manner in which we share responsibility for the aged, the sick, the needy; even our mission and place among the world's nations: all these depend on our sense of ourselves as a people—that is, as a cultural reality. In other words, these social issues depend on how we remember ourselves.