Week 7: New Voices in Poetry
Study Guide
(Return to the Week 7 Schedule)
|
1. Author Biography America's "good grey poet" was born on Long Island, New York, to Dutch and English parents. While his mother, Louisa Van Velsor, labored to care for their nine children—four of them invalids, his father, Walter, Sr., worked as a carpenter and house builder. Like his siblings, Walter, Jr., the second oldest of the nine, withdrew early from school to find work to help pay the family's expenses. He secured a job in a local printing company and fell in love with the profession, continuing his education at the press. A voracious reader, he swept through all of the major English and European literary classics. The printer's trade led him to journalism, and Whitman took several editing positions in the early 1840's. He founded the Long Islander before accepting posts with several other newspapers. In 1848, he left New York to relocate in New Orleans where he worked for only a few months on the editorial staff of the New Orleans Crescent. Angered by his encounter with the heinous practices of slavery in the deep South, on his return to New York, Whitman founded a "free soil" newspaper, the Brooklyn Freeman, that become his voice for the anti-slavery movement. At the same time, Whitman was beginning to develop his poetry and the various conventions of what came to be called "free verse." He finished his first volume, Leaves of Grass, and when no publisher would accept it on moral grounds, Whitman printed the first 1,000 copies privately. His subsequent seven revisions became the principal labor of his literary life. Responding to Emerson's call in "The Poet" for such a bard to rise up out of the American experience to clarify the nation's spirituality, Whitman sent a copy of the first edition of his twelve-poem volume of Leaves of Grass to his spiritual mentor in Concord. Emerson was delighted with the literary "sunbeam," and he sent his now famous note back to New York, greeting his younger protégé "at the beginning of a great career." In time, Emerson, Thoreau, Bronson Alcott, Oscar Wilde, and other literati on both sides of the Atlantic would make their pilgrimage to honor "America's national poet." For the most part, however, the majority of Americans ignored both the man and his work, and Whitman lived in poverty all of his life, selling a few copies of his work here and there out of his own home. Whitman survived through "literary hack work and journalism" in Brooklyn, all the while continuing to work on the next edition of his poems. He published the second edition of Leaves of Grass in 1856 and the primary edition in 1860. The outbreak of the Civil War, however, interrupted his work on Leaves, and when his brother George was wounded in 1862, Whitman relocated to Washington, D. C. to help him. Whitman stayed on in the capital after his brother recovered, serving as a war nurse and clerk in the Union Army's paymaster's office. Out of these war experiences came Drum Taps (1865), its renowned tribute to the assassinated President Lincoln, "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed," the centerpiece in this collection of Civil War poem. In 1865, Whitman continued his government work with a short-lived appointment to the Bureau of Indian Affairs. When his supervisor discovered that Whitman was, in fact, the author of the "notorious" Leaves of Grass, his supervisor dismissed him on moral grounds. Whitman soon found work, however, in the attorney general's office, and an article, "The Good Grey Poet," published by his friend, William Douglas O'Conner, did much to vindicate Whitman's work and reputation. Between 1866 and 1874, before he left his post in Washington, D.C., Whitman managed to publish two more editions of Leaves of Grass. In 1873, however, he suffered a severe stroke from which he never fully recovered. His brother George took him in to his own home in Camden, New Jersey, while he was recuperating. In time, Whitman became well enough to give occasional lectures at local libraries and other public arenas, and in 1879 he was able to complete his long-planned tour of the American western states and territories, traveling as far west as Nevada. In 1881 Osgood and Company, a Boston publisher, accepted Leaves of Grass for printing, and the book sold well until the district attorney classified the work as obscene. Frustrated, Whitman took the plates first to Rees Welsh and later to David McKay, in Philadelphia, from where afterwards his works continued to be published. Whitman's only notable royalties came from the sales of Specimen Days and Collect (1882). Orders for the book were so strong that the sales earned him enough to purchase his little house on Mickle Street in Camden where he would live out the remainder of his days. For the next decade, he continued to receive visitors there who sought him out, posed for many photographs, and accepted the accolades of his followers. In 1892, even on his deathbed, Whitman signed the final edition of Leaves of Grass, and he was laid to rest in Camden's Harleigh Cemetery in a tomb of his own design. 2. Textual Orientation Abandoning the conventions of regularity in form and style in American poetry so popular in the mid-nineteenth century, Whitman adopted the cadences of music, crafting the organic and fluid features of open lines, expansive catalogs, the lyrical flow of imaginary flights, and ecstatic explosions of themes--all features of his "free verse," a style complementary to Whitman's purpose of capturing the spiritual energy of the ever evolving and unfolding American democracy. 3. Texts (Online) 3) Walt Whitman's Notebooks: The Library of Congress 4. Key Concepts Walt Whitman created what was to become one of the most distinctive of all American poetic forms, “free verse,” a pattern of lines and stanzas without a fixed metrical pattern or ending rhyme scheme. Only such an open form complemented his ecstatic vision of American democracy and expansion, concepts that he spiritualized in “Song of Myself,” the lead work in his seminal book of poetry, Leaves of Grass. 5. Critical Thinking Questions Analysis 1) Identify Whitman’s use of open form, or “free verse.” 2) Identify poems from the reading selections that celebrate “American idealism.” Interpretation 1) Trace the stages through which the voice of Whitman evolves in “Song of Myself.” 2) Identify poems from the reading selections that celebrate “American idealism.” Evaluation 1) What might some nineteenth-century readers found objectionable in Whitman’s poetry? 2) Explain why no other established form of poetry would be appropriate for Whitman’s vision of the American experiment in democracy. 6. Online Resources Author Websites 3) Walt Whitman's Notebooks: The Library of Congress E-Text Websites 1) Walt Whitman at Poetry Exhibts.org 4) Selected Poetry of Walt Whitman Analytical/Interpretational Websites 1) Walt Whitman and the Development of Leaves of Grass 2) Constructing Walt Whitman: The Critics Contend with the Good G(r)ay Poet Emily Dickinson (1830 – 1886) Subversive to her narrow community and rebellious against the conventions of her tiny literary circle, Emily Dickinson remains one of the most innovative of all American poets. Born in Amherst, Massachusetts, to one of the most respected families of her small New England town—her father Edward was a member of Congress and treasurer of Amherst College for forty years—Emily Dickinson rarely left her home and community. Her educational excursion to South Hadley Female Seminary (Mount Holyoke) failed after a year, and with the exceptions of visits to Washington, Boston, and Philadelphia, she made few trips outside Amherst. While the social affairs of her life may have seemed confined, if not restricted, her genius and imagination defined her personal locus, much as it would for Whitman, as nothing less than the center of the universe. She orchestrated and managed an intensely rarefied and passionate world, stimulated, at least in part, by her penchant for forbidden readings and the tumultuous relationships within the circles of her own family. She maintained an active correspondence, but concentrated most of her attention on her more than 1,700 poems. Emily Dickinson wrote much of her work, sitting at a small desk in the upstairs bedroom of her family’s homestead, the red-brick, two-story house at 431 Main Street. Peering out of the shuttered windows across the fields to the southeast or scanning the grounds and gardens, Emily Dickinson cultivated inspiration. Through her poetry, she explored every corner of a truth, telling it “slant,” capturing it at the very flashpoint of revelation. Insights tripping over themselves at right angles, every fractured line of an Emily Dickinson poem is illuminated with wit that penetrates to the very quick of an experience. Never written expressly for publication, each short poem appears to have been composed as a private enterprise, eventually finding its place in little hand-stitched bindings she called “fasciles.” Through the years, she sent a few of her poems to close friends and confidants, but less than twenty ever saw publication in her lifetime. More and more, the details of Emily Dickinson’s life are emerging from behind the public image members of her family projected after her death, that of the Victorian spinster, outfitted to the neckline in flowing white gowns, ensconced between the rows of her flower garden. Closer to the truth, she nurtured several long and endearing relationships, including apparently, although she never married, at least one lover. Even though she chose not to address personalities in her works, her poems certainly reflect the vitality of those relationships, if little of their data. Emily Dickinson regaled in life and the living of it. The deaths of close friends stunned her, and yet, their passing only seemed to intensify her own acute sense of life’s mystery, and sometimes, within only the turn of a phrase, her genius seemed to lift her well beyond its boundaries. Although she prickled at the conservative Christianity of her Amherst neighbors, Emily Dickinson settled comfortably and confidently into her own recognition of the immortality of every given moment. It was not without its own various shades of irony, then, that on her tombstone, she protests, “Called Back.” 2. Textual Orientation Emily Dickinson wrote 1,775 poems, almost all of which were published after her death. Each of her works is short, characterized by intense, penetrating, and often ironic insight, and sometimes even pained obscurity. Together, however, the volume of the work reflects her obvious genius and poignant individualism. The subjects of her poetry range across a wide spectrum of daily experiences common to all people—delight in the vision of birds in her garden, the loss of a close family member, a winter afternoon, to such various emotional states as grief, melancholy, ecstasy, and joy. 3. Texts (Online) 1) Dickinson Electronic Archives 2) Poetry Exhibits: The Academy of American Poets/Emily Dickinson 3) Modern American Poetry: Emily Dickinson 4. Key Concepts Like the poetry of Walt Whitman, who is generally credited with the development of “free verse,” Emily Dickinson spurned the fixtures and conventions of much of the didactic and morally rearming and reaffirming poetry of her period. An enigmatic character at the least, Emily Dickinson was deeply troubled by the conventional religious concepts that theologians were addressing in their day and to which she always remained aloof. 5. Critical Thinking Questions Analysis 1) From the readings, cite examples that illustrate how Emily Dickinson ties the explanation of abstractions to concrete details. 2) What types of events and human experiences attract her attention as subjects worthy of poetic rendering? What experiences of importance during her lifetime does she choose not to address? Interpretation 1) Select any poem from the readings of your text. Try to paraphrase it. 2) Explain why so many of Emily Dickinson’s poetry address single moments of experience or perception. Evaluation 1) Explain why Emily Dickinson’s poetry marks a break with poetry already introduced in this course. 2) Why might Emily Dickinson’s poetry be read comfortably with the works of Walt Whitman? 6. Online Resources Author Websites 1) The Emily Dickinson International Society 2) PAL: Perspectives in American Literature/Emily Dickinson 3) A New Photograph of Emily Dickinson? 4) The Dickinson Homestead: Home of Emily Dickinson E-Text Websites 1) Dickinson Electronic Archives 2) Poetry Exhibits: The Academy of American Poets/Emily Dickinson 3) Modern American Poetry: Emily Dickinson Analytical/Interpretational Websites 1) Bookmarks: Emily Dickinson on the World Wide Web 3) Selected American Authors: Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman 4) The Emily Dickinson Journal This page was last modified on January 12, 2007, and is maintained by Dr. Geoffrey Grimes. .  |
1.
Author Biography