THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 19 TH AND FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 20 TH AMERICAN LITERATURE Literary magazine info Go over Modern Transcendentalism in Pop Culture Assignment: You can turn it in the first class back after break. Post Secrets Thank you notes Walt Whitman and Emily Dickenson informational slides. Handout Read and annotate poems Answer questions about Whitman Standard 2 & 3

A NEW AMERICAN POETRY WHITMAN AND DICKINSON

WHITMAN’S EARLY LIFE He was born May 31, 1819 in New York. His formal schooling ended at age 11. He worked as office boy and printer’s assistant. He became a journalist by the age of 20.

WHITMAN’S TRAVELS Around 1850, Whitman began traveling around the U.S. Travels gave Whitman a perspective on the vastness of the United States. Travels exposed Whitman to various cultures within the nation.

WHITMAN’S BEGINNING OF WRITING CAREER Editor of newspapers The Freeman Brooklyn Eagle New York Aurora Kept notebooks of travels Kept notebooks of poems

LEAVES OF GRASS Self-published in 1855 Set some of type himself Publicized by sending excerpts to known authors Published 9 editions, poems in 1855 edition 350 poems in 1892 edition Themes include Sacredness of self Death as part of cycle of life Equality of all beings

WHITMAN’S POETIC ELEMENTS Free verse Cadence Run of words that rise and fall to make emphasis of thought Need to read poems aloud to hear cadence Other poetic elements Assonance Alliteration Onomatopoeia Parallel structure Imagery

“SONG OF MYSELF” Made up of 52 parts which parallel a year Whitman billed himself as speaker for American people Introduced free verse Employs chant and ordinary speech

WHITMAN’S CIVIL WAR EXPERIENCE Served as a “wound dresser” Was greatly affected by the carnage of the war Drum Taps based on war experiences

RESPONDING TO THE ASSASSINATION OF LINCOLN “Oh Captain, My Captain” Style atypical for Whitman in that it contained a regular rhyme and uses a traditional form

DICKINSON’S EARLY LIFE She was born to religious, well-to-do family and had a normal childhood in Amherst, Massachusetts. Everyone expected her to marry and raise a family like most women of her class. This all suddenly changed when she was 24.

POET AND RECLUSE “Dickinson used precise language and unique poetic forms to simultaneously reveal and conceal her private thoughts and feelings” (Elements of Literature 345). What happened to turn a young girl into an unrecognized poet who never left her house?

What would cause a young woman of 24 suddenly to isolate herself within her yard and house and ignore the world outside?

SPECULATIONS ABOUT WHY: Left Amherst to go to Washington D.C. with her father, a congressman, because she had fallen in love with a married lawyer, who soon died of TB. There, she fell in love with another married man, Charles Wadsworth, a minister. He moved to San Francisco in About this time she wrote, “I sing as the boy does by the burying ground, because I am afraid.”

RETURN TO AMHERST Within a few years, she had retreated from all social life in Amherst. Always wearing white, like the bride she would never be, she remained in her parents’ house and restricted herself to household work and writing poetry, which she would sometimes send to people as gifts for valentines or birthdays, along with a pie or some cookies.

DICKINSON’S POEMS  Only a few of her poems were published in her lifetime. She sent four of them to a critic, Mr. Higginson, asking for his help. When he sent suggestions for changing her poems, she replied in a letter, “Thank you for the surgery; it was not so painful as I supposed. I bring you others, as you ask” (Higginson).

After her death, friends and relatives found bundles of her poems, which they edited and “corrected” and had published in installments. In 1955, Thomas H. Johnson finally published a collection of her poems that had not been “corrected.” These are the versions we read today.

WHAT SORT OF POET WAS SHE? Dickinson is known for using poetry as private observation. Her poems are carefully crafted in rhyme and meter.

 She did not even publish many of her works in her lifetime. It was only after her death that critics came to appreciate her unique genius and placed her at the center of American literature.  Now, indeed, her poems do go out to “the World.”  Inspired partly by Emerson, Dickinson treated some of the same themes that he and other writers of the nineteenth century addressed in their work: nature, death, pain, love, separation.

Indeed, one feels that Dickinson may have had much in common with Whitman, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and even Edgar Allan Poe. The reasons behind Dickinson’s relatively poor reception in her own life, however, may lie in her complex, unusual style, which is characterized by the use of dashes, slant rhyme, and ambiguous, elusive language.