AMERICAN POETRY IS a good place to begin, both to begin with and to begin in. Its cultural context, the very imagination of America itself, has for centuries relied so heavily on tropes of beginnings and futures that they have become stereotypical. America is undoubtedly the place of beginnings in modernity, the very site of the future: the New World, the land of opportunity. America has served and continues to serve this imaginary and symbolic function, having been subjected as a concept to a US-American nationalization, and examples of its construction in cultural artifacts all over the world are too numerous, varied, and indeed familiar to be listed here at length. Remarkably, the most well-known instances are also those that are most often misrepresented, for example John Locke's famous statement in the Second Treatise of Government that “in the beginning all the world was America” (22), which is much less of an aphorism when considered in its context and quoted in full, since it refers to an America that was characterized by the absence of that which has since come to define it to a significant extent: “Thus in the beginning all the world was America, and more so than that is now; for no such thing as money was anywhere known” (22). Other instances of the imaginative construction of America as a place of beginnings have come at a great price, and many beginnings have been made at the cost of those who had already begun in America: when Alexis de Tocqueville states in Democracy in America that “those coasts so well suited for trade and industry, those deep rivers, that inexhaustible valley of the Mississippi— in short, the whole continent—seemed the yet empty cradle of a great nation” (30), he does so after having declared the other civilizations on that continent to be quite uncivilized and “only waiting” (30) for the true beginning of civilization that would be made by the Europeans. Yet there would only be more beginnings after that, especially in the context of US-American nation-building: the creation of the American republic itself was framed as nothing less than a new beginning of everything. As Thomas Paine puts it in Common Sense, “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.