Themes

As the title of the poem notes, an important theme in “I Hear America Singing” by Walt Whitman is music. Still, the dominant theme of the poem is work, especially that of ‘blue-collar workers’.

Work

The dominant theme of the poem “I Hear America Singing” is work, specifically hard and intense manual labor. Whitman clearly dedicates the poem to people who work hard day by day: mechanics, carpenters, masons, boatmen, deckhands, shoemakers, hatters, wood-cutters, ploughboys, mothers, wives or girls. These types of people who perform manual labor and are physically active are called ‘blue-collar workers’. Notice the absence of ‘while-collar workers’ in Whitman’s poem: doctors, poets, teachers or writers. It becomes quite obvious that Whitman had a sort of disgust for ‘white-collar workers’, whom he probably considered not worthy of being mentioned...