Politics & Power Quote by Rita Dove

“The American Dream” arrives here less as a promise than as a burden you don’t get to set down. Rita Dove’s verb choice, “wrestle,” strips the slogan of its patriotic sheen and turns it into lived conflict: not an inheritance, but a match that keeps restarting. It’s a poet’s move to expose how a national catchphrase works as both comfort and cudgel, offering hope while quietly policing who gets to claim it.

Dove’s second sentence refuses the tidy singular. “It means a lot of things to different people” sounds democratic, but the subtext is sharper: the Dream’s ambiguity isn’t accidental. A phrase that can mean anything can be invoked to justify almost anything - meritocracy myths, bootstrap morality, or the erasure of structural barriers. By emphasizing multiplicity, she highlights a cultural trick: Americans argue less about whether the Dream exists than about whose story counts as proof.

“I think we’re redefining it now” places the line in a moment of social recalibration, suggesting pressure from below rather than rebranding from above. “Now” implies a historical hinge - shifting demographics, widening inequality, contested rights, the public reckoning over race and belonging. Dove, as a Black woman poet who has moved through elite institutions, understands the Dream’s double vision: it can be a ladder and a blindfold.

The intent isn’t to dismiss the Dream but to seize authorship. If the phrase will shadow us for life, she suggests, the only ethical response is to fight over its meaning openly - and to let the redefinition be shaped by those the old definition left out.