More Poems for Independence Day

Last year, for reading around the 4th of July holiday, we put together a selection of classic American poems by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Emma Lazarus, Walt Whitman, Carl Sandburg & Stephen Vincent Benét. This year we’ve added a poem written about America by an English romantic — William Blake’s “America, A Prophecy,” in which he folds the story of the American revolution into his own mythical universe. Enjoy the fireworks, in the sky and on the page!