This Land Is Your Land Analysis

This Land Is Your Land is a poem written by Woodrow Wilson “Woody” Guthrie in February of 1940; in April of 1944 it was eventually set to music and turned into a song. On the first reading of this poem, especially when one takes into account the song that was learned in childhood, it has a very patriotic feel to it, “This land is your land this land is my land / this land was made for you and me” (Guthrie 1:1, 1:4). Upon closer inspection, when the last three stanzas of the poem are taken into account, we see that this is not the case at all, and different meaning comes to light. The song that everyone knows today is somewhat different than the original poem that was written by Guthrie, why is this? To get a better understanding of Guthrie’s poem, you have to get a better understanding of what was going on in the world during the time the poem was written …show more content…
But was it originally intended to be as patriotic as everyone thinks it is? This poem started out as Woody Guthrie’s rebuttal of Irving Berlin’s patriotic song God Bless America. Guthrie disliked the song because he felt that “if God was going to bless America…why was He waiting so long?” (Santelli Ch. 3). He believed that the song didn’t take the side if the hard working people. The first few verses of the poem describe “idyllic visions” of America; however, the poem begins to have an “overtly political” feel in the poems fourth verse (Santelli Ch. 3). One April 25, 1944, Guthrie recorded God Blessed America for the first time, but the title was changed to This Land Is My Land (Santelli Ch.). The first time that the This Land Is My Land or This Land, Guthrie could not decide which title to use, was heard on the radio was in 1945 when Woody Guthrie on a radio show called American Music Festival; Guthrie later used This Land Is My Land as the theme of his short lived radio program called The Ballad Gazette (Santelli Ch.