America the Beautiful - The Jazz Ambassadors

Katharine Lee Bates
About the Author of America the Beautiful

by Jone Johnson Lewis
Updated November 26, 2017
Katharine Lee Bates, a poet, scholar, educator, and writer, is known for writing "America the Beautiful" lyrics. She's also known, though less widely, as a prolific poet and for her scholarly works of literary criticism, A professor of English and head of the English Department at Wellesley College who had been a student there in her earlier years, Bates was a pioneer faculty member helping build Wellesley's reputation and thereby the reputation of women's higher education.


She lived from August 12, 1859 to March 28, 1929.

Early Life and Teaching
Her father, a Congregational minister, died when Katharine was less than a month old. Her brothers had to go to work to help support the family, but Katharine was given an education. She received her B.A. from Wellesley College in 1880. She wrote to supplement her income. "Sleep" was published by The Atlantic Monthly during her undergraduate years at Wellesley.

Bates' teaching career was the central interest of her adult life. She believed that through literature, human values could be revealed and developed.

America the Beautiful
A trip to Colorado in 1893 and the view from Pikes Peak inspired Katharine Lee Bates to write the poem, "America the Beautiful," which was published in The Congregationalist two years after she wrote it. The Boston Evening Transcript published a revised version in 1904, and the public adopted the idealistic poem quickly.

Active Involvements
Katharine Lee Bates helped found the New England Poetry Club in 1915 and served for a time as its president, and she was involved in a few social reform activities, working for labor reform and planning the College Settlements Association with Vida Scudder. She was raised in the Congregational faith of her ancestors; as an adult, she was deeply religious but could not find a church in whose faith she could be certain.


Partnership
Katharine Lee Bates lived for twenty-five years with Katharine Coman in a committed partnership that has sometimes been described as a "romantic friendship." Bates wrote, after Coman died, "So much of me died with Katharine Coman that I'm sometimes not quite sure whether I'm alive or not."

Background, Family:
Mother: Cornelia Frances Lee, teacher, a graduate of Mount Holyoke Seminary (later known as Mount Holyoke College)
Father: William Bates, Congregational minister, studied at Middlebury College, Vermont, and Andover Theological Seminary, Massachusetts
Katharine Lee Bates was the youngest daughter
Companion: Katharine Coman (professor at Wellesley, died 1915)
Children: none
Education:
Wellesley College, A.B. 1880
Oxford 1889-90
Wellesley, A.M. 1891

https://www.thoughtco.com/katharine-lee-bates-biography-3530877

The first draft of "America the Beautiful" was hastily jotted down in a notebook during the summer of 1893, which Bates spent teaching English at Colorado College in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Later she remembered:

One day some of the other teachers and I decided to go on a trip to 14,000-foot Pikes Peak. We hired a prairie wagon. Near the top we had to leave the wagon and go the rest of the way on mules. I was very tired. But when I saw the view, I felt great joy. All the wonder of America seemed displayed there, with the sea-like expanse.

Ponder explains how Bates had personally experienced sexist prejudice and discrimination, had witnessed the ravages of the industrial revolution in both America and Britain, had seen first hand urban poverty and misery, and that she keenly wished for equality. Ponder claims that it was this desire for an inclusive American "brotherhood" that inspired the poem, which was written during the severe economic depression of 1893.[1] The words to her famous poem first appeared in print in The Congregationalist, a weekly journal, for Independence Day, 1895. The poem reached a wider audience when her revised version was printed in the Boston Evening Transcript on November 19, 1904. Her final expanded version was written in 1913. When a version appeared in her collection America the Beautiful, and Other Poems (1912), a reviewer in the New York Times wrote: "we intend no derogation to Miss Katharine Lee Bates when we say that she is a good minor poet."[18] On November 11, 1918, the 26th Infantry Division of the US Army (colloquially known as the Yankee Division) sang "America the Beautiful" upon hearing the announcement of the Armistice.[1]:xvii

The hymn has been sung to several tunes, but the familiar one is by Samuel A. Ward (1847–1903), written for his hymn "Materna" (1882).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katharine_Lee_Bates