next to of course god america i
love you land of the pilgrims’ and so forth

E. E. Cummings’s “next to of course god america i” is a satirical poem written in the interwar period and first published in 1926. Cummings, who had served as an ambulance driver in World War I and was briefly imprisoned in France on suspicion of disloyalty, often distrusted patriotic rhetoric and mass conformity. The poem mimics the cadences of public oratory—campaign speeches, civic ceremonies, and flag-waving addresses—by piling up stock phrases (“land of the pilgrims’ and so forth”) and breathless exclamations. Its typographical play and fractured syntax dramatize how patriotic language can become automatic, performative, and emotionally coercive rather than thoughtful or humane.

The quoted lines parody a speaker who professes love of country through clichés rather than genuine feeling. By reducing revered formulas to “and so forth,” Cummings exposes how national piety can slide into empty recitation, where “god” and “america” are invoked as unquestionable absolutes. The poem’s broken grammar and unconventional spacing enact the speaker’s mental and moral disarray, suggesting that loud patriotism may mask fear, aggression, or unexamined habit. At the same time, the poem’s final turn (elsewhere in the text) complicates the satire by contrasting rote nationalism with a quieter, more personal sense of what America might mean.