What makes an American “classic”?

American “classics,” and “classic” definitions of America and its people, are often tied to an apparently inescapable, ineffable sense of greatness. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN has resurfaced as the mantra of 2025, with the newly elected President’s promise to restore a broken nation, elevating it above time, and in defiance of his own criminal record, even above the law. The slogan echoes some of the tones, if not the politics, of the preface of Leaves of Grass (1855), when Walt Whitman wrote, “The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem…”