Welcome to the American Story. Mostly true stories about what it is that makes America beautiful.

Heartbreaking, funny, inspiring, and endlessly interesting.

This is Chris Flannery with the Claremont Institute.

I call this one American Names. A poem comes to a poet,

and he sends it orphaned out into the world

to take its chances.

It never knows who or what it might inspire or how it might become part of the world it has stepped into

Stephen Vincent Bonet sent his poem American Names out into the world in the Yale Review in 1927.

It is about one whose ancestral European attachments

give way to his Native American ones.

Here are a few stanzas. give way to his Native American ones.

Here are a few stanzas.

I have fallen in love with American names,

the sharp names that never get fat,

the snake skin titles of mining claims, the plumed war bonnet of medicine

hat, Tucson and Deadwood and lost meal flat.

Sen and Piave are silver spoons, but the flat. played on the keys of a post boy's horn.

But I will remember where I was born.

I shall not rest quiet in Monparnasse.

I shall not lie easy at winchil sea.

You may bury my body in Sussex grass. You may bury my

tongue at Shammedee. I shall not be there. I shall rise and pass.

...