Essay: Song of Myself by Walt Whitman and The Columbiad by Joel Barlow

History books nor history itself can erase the fact that all of us has patriotism towards our own countries. It can be quite reasonable for many American writers in the 19th century to show off their own American national identity. However, America consists of various immigrants with different national backgrounds. Therefore, in American nationalism, patriotism need not to be confused with nationalism since nationalism is attached to the desire for power to serve other purposes be it political or self-promotional. America’s mission is to establish and secure the existence of a non-existing identity which is used to unite all of its 50 states. However, would America be the America today if it had been settled by British settlers in the 1th and 1th century? In this essay, we will go through both the Song of Myself by Walt Whitman and The Columbiad by Joel Barlow to highlight historical fabrication, author’s self-promoting and political purposes in American nationalism.
The question in the introduction highlights the historical fabrication technique used in American literature to emphases nationalism. In Whitman’s Preface, transcendentalism is used to make men inspired by their own senses neglecting the existence of God and the other. That itself is no different than someone who fabricates something and believes his own fabrication making it the ideal way to think about a certain thing.  One can sense historical fabrication in the way Whitman hates people to reflect and invites them to loathe and laze around and do nothing taking Rip Van Winkle as an example. Also, Americans claim the tendency to break from the rules of their past which are the constraints that came from the Old World. Furthermore, Christopher Colombus didn’t discover America and The Colombiad is written solely to the overwhelming fabricated love of the first founder of America. European and especially British immigrants and settlers were the people who created firstly the American Nation the way European Jewish immigrated using their Zionist movement to Palestine to establish a false identity on a country which has its own citizens. The case of Israel regarding the Palestinians and the Arab as their enemy parallels the way American Nationalism “relied upon a process of recording first the English, and then other groups as ‘the enemy'” (Sturgess 24). Israelis claim that Jerusalem is purely made for them and that they are God’s chosen people can be seen in America’s use of Shakespeare’s words to express their hate of Britain and claiming that it is where the melting-pot happens because no nation is better than American nation.
America was rife with self-promoting writers eager for distinction and stimulating the uniqueness of their country. The reason of the two poems having prefaces is to mold people’s way of interrupting the poem as if telling the reader to cut his sense of interpretation and follow the lead. In Song of Myself, Whitman keeps saying the word “he” to implicitly refer to himself. Moreover, by hearing the phrase “The Bard”, we think of Shakespeare, but Whitman used the bard to promote himself as the greatest bard of America. Describing how he has beard and he has his shirt unbuttoned at the top to illustrate that he is proudly American, Whitman tries to establish an American national identity out of the same English cloths ,but with an Americanized changes made to them. Those changes are quite clever since we can detect that a man is Khaleeje or not by observing his way of clothes which is mostly Thob (white piece of clothing). In The Columbiad, Barlow claimed that he took the freedom to make some changes in the description of the events that’s about to be described in the poem. That demonstrates self-promoting since that information itself is not necessary in the Preface because judging from the title, the author obviously didn’t witness the time Columbus was there and the events which happened in his time.
The way media manipulates the American nation highlights that nationalism can contribute to fear and international conflicts. In American media, Islam and other races are shown as terrorists which magnifies the mass of irresponsible brain-washed people by their media. Moreover, politicizing poetry is a favorite of Whitman where he told poets about their function which transcends expressing personal emotions to describing national identity in his collection of poems. The title “Grass of Leaves” serves as a metaphor that all the citizens of America are equal and like the grass, they grow everywhere. His idea that Americans are equally growing everywhere in a fast pace is the same as the political idea of the melting-pot and is very similar to Israel’s way of attracting Jewish immigrants into its border. The way America created its national identity is quite politically twisted. For example, Jefferson on The Declaration of Independence clarified that he holds no grudge for the Englishmen except the King of Great Britain listing a grocery-list of complaints about British monarchy and government. The element of fabricated innocence is continued along in The Columbiad where Barlow descries the British as having brutal hearts and narrates how the British cruelty was to the pioneers. In fact, American politics of accusing someone as the enemy served as an image which “helped to create and construct a separate national identity.”(Heideking 95). American nationalists try their best to show off that they are the land of the free and the brave associating it with both aspects of jealousy and hatred towards England and the others whom their government categorized as an enemy. Some Americans said that they just hate the British government and not the citizens themselves as if divorcing and separating inseparable things and denying a fact that a government and its citizens are forever co-existing together.
In conclusion, American nationalism is an issue of built up ideas which has been achieved throughout the history and now.  It picturizes a multiple-types of history: made of lies, self-advertising and political.