Tony Hoagland

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“America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.” – Abraham Lincoln Tony Hoagland show us the point of view of a teacher in the poem “America” who is having a problem adjusting to the changing times of the country. The main character that is the teacher is looking at what America is now and sees the things that have changed and it is not settling well with him. Hoagland uses various figures of speech, imagery, and symbolism to further explain the point of view of the teacher.

“The students with blue hair and a tongue ring” (1) when we read this line it makes us visualize a young man in a class room with blue hair and a tongue ring. Also this shows were the country …show more content…
It being 2003 there may have been a little more security of the American people after 9/11 happened making it seem like a “maximum-security prison”, or made America seem suffocating beause of the dangers that living in America may cause. The author of the poem Tony Hoagland wrote the character of the teacher to be someone who may not like the generation of teenagers he is living in. He might not know how to teach his student how to appreciate the way America was when he was a student. Or to remain the way he was when he was the age of the student with all the pressure of the changing times moving in all around. Tony Hoagland uses many metaphors to get his point across like when describing America as a “maximum security prison”. Also Imagery to describe to the reader what he is looking at and how that time period looked like when describing the student with the blue hair and tongue ring. And finally he used symbolism to further describe the time period and how the teacher was feeling about all the changes he was experiencing. Like the river that he talks about when describing how we are all on a river with people drowning underneath us. Tony Hoagland uses the poem “America” to tell us the story of the teacher is surrounded by the changing America and how he doesn’t like to live in a world that is taken over with materialistic citizens. And people who just genially don’t care about the wellbeing of others. The teacher dosent care for the fact that the future generations will have no other ways of finding true happiness in other ways like memories with their friend and families, or good social interactions, not just having the newest thing. He doesn’t like to live in an America that he fears that the future of the country will not be similar to the way it that he is used
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