Passage IV

America the Beautiful

[1]

Katharine Lee Bates had rarely traveled out of her home state of Massachusetts before the excursion that would take her by wagon and then by mule to the top of Pikes Peak in July of 1893. As she began her motion in an upward direction of the towering landmark in Colorado Springs, Bates looked up in awe at the Rocky Mountains rising majestically into the clouds.

[2]

Bates, a professor of English at Wellesley College, had traveled by train with several colleagues to Colorado College to teach a three-week session. The trip itself was an adventure. Instead, a two-day train ride ended in Chicago, where the World's Columbian Exposition, a nineteenth-century world's fair, was taking place. West of Chicago, the train's vision shifted with the passing miles. In Colorado, because the expanse of ripening grain under ample skies gave way to the spectacle of the Rocky Mountains.

[3]

Bates composed the first verse of her poem, "America the Beautiful" while standing atop Pikes Peak. From the crest, at an elevation of over 14,000 feet high up in elevation, she gazed out at an America she had never seen before, the land below as vast as the sky above.

[4]

After descending to Colorado Springs that evening, Bates could not get the spirit of the landscape or the staggering sight of the purples, browns, greens, and golds of the mountain vista out of her mind. She wrote down four stanzas of the poem in her notebook, however, she was not pleased with this first attempt and set it aside.

[5]

Two years later, when she found her notes from the Colorado trip, rewrote the poem, and submitted it for publication. "America the Beautiful" appeared in the July 4, 1895, issue of The Congregationalist magazine. But Bates, whichever the perfectionist, continued to revise the poem. In 1913, she revised "America the Beautiful" for the last time, and, like some previous versions, it was set to the tune of the old hymn "Materna." This version, still sung today, reflects Katharine Lee Bates’s own encounter with the vastness and natural beauty of the United States of America.