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Guest Essay

By Elisa New

Ms. New directs and hosts PBS’s “Poetry in America.”

In 1865, the poet Walt Whitman asked:

O what shall I hang on the chamber walls?

And what shall the pictures be that I hang on the walls,

To adorn the burial-house of him I love?

I have always loved these three lines from Whitman’s elegy “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” which he wrote in the spring of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. I have been thinking about them as we mark the 249th year since the ratification of the Declaration of Independence. The lines distill an essential question that any artist and civic figure who believes American ideals are worth sustaining must ask: How shall we honor, remember and learn from our national past? And how shall we transmit essential values of the past to citizens of the future?

I’ve had Whitman in mind this spring as we’ve watched the Trump administration and its Department of Government Efficiency disassemble the cultural infrastructure of the nation. These reckless and shortsighted cuts have affected our libraries and museums, our public media institutions,........

© The New York Times