4. American Poetry

The poetry of the United States, arose first as efforts by colonists to add their voices to English poetry in the 17th century, well before the constitutional unification of the thirteen colonies (although before this unification, a strong oral tradition often likened to poetry existed among Native American societies).Unsurprisingly, most of the early colonists' work relied on contemporary British models of poetic form, diction, and theme.

Topic 1: American Transcendentalism and Realism

  

Walt Whitman

Ralp Waldo Emerson

Emily Dickinson

During the nineteenth century a movement of ideas influenced writers. These ideas originated from the philosopher Immanuel Kant. He used the term transcendentalism to refer to intuitive knowledge not derived from the senses.

Topic 2:Conceptual Poetry

In a station of the Metro

" The apparition of these faces in the crowd; petal on a wet, black bough".

Ezra Pound

Topic 3: Symbolism Poetry

T.S. ELLIOT was born in Missouri in 1888. He is considered one of the most innovative authors of the twentieth-century poetry. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. He was also influenced by symbolism.

Topic 4: Literature of Revolution

Philips Weatley

Phillis Weatley

On July 11, 1761, one ship sailed into the port at Boston, with many slaves from Africa. There was a small African girl, the only seven-year-old who survived from diseases and death.                                                                                        

Main representatives

Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman was born on May 31, 1819, the second son of Walter Whitman, a housebuilder, and Louisa Van Velsor. The family, which consisted of nine children, lived in Brooklyn and Long Island in the 1820s and 1830s.

At the age of twelve, Whitman began to learn the printer’s trade, and fell in love with the written word. Largely self-taught, he read voraciously, becoming acquainted with the works of Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and the Bible.

Whitman worked as a printer in New York City until a devastating fire in the printing district demolished the industry. In 1836, at the age of seventeen, he began his career as teacher in the one-room school houses of Long Island. He continued to teach until 1841, when he turned to journalism as a full-time career.

He founded a weekly newspaper, Long-Islander, and later edited a number of Brooklyn and New York papers. In 1848, in the fall of 1848, he founded a “free soil” newspaper, the Brooklyn Freeman, and continued to develop the unique style of poetry that later so astonished Ralph Waldo Emerson.

In 1855, Whitman took out a copyright on the first edition of Leaves of Grass, which consisted of twelve untitled poems and a preface. He published the volume himself, and sent a copy to Emerson in July of 1855. Whitman released a second edition of the book in 1856, containing thirty-three poems,

In the simple two-story clapboard house, Whitman spent his declining years working on additions and revisions to a new edition of the book and preparing his final volume of poems and prose, Good-Bye, My Fancy (David McKay, 1891). After his death on March 26, 1892, Whitman was buried in a tomb he designed and had built on a lot in Harleigh Cemetery.

When I Read the Book

When I read the book, the biography famous,

And is this then (said I) what the author calls a man’s life?

And so will someone when I am dead and gone write my life?

(As if any man really knew aught my life,

Why even I myself I often think know little or nothing of my real life,

Only a few hints, a few diffused faint clews and indirections

I seek for my own use to trace out here.)

Walt Whitman, 1819 - 1892

Emily Dickinson
Emily Dickinson was born on December 10, 1830, in Amherst, Massachusetts. She attended Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in South Hadley, but only for one year. Throughout her life, she seldom left her home and visitors were few. The people with whom she did come in contact, however, had an enormous impact on her poetry. She was particularly stirred by the Reverend Charles Wadsworth, whom she first met on a trip to Philadelphia. 

She admired the poetry of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, as well as John Keats. Though she was dissuaded from reading the verse of her contemporary Walt Whitman by rumors of its disgracefulness, the two poets are now connected by the distinguished place they hold as the founders of a uniquely American poetic voice. While Dickinson was extremely prolific as a poet and regularly enclosed poems in letters to friends, she was not publicly recognized during her lifetime. The first volume of her work was published posthumously in 1890 and the last in 1955. She died in Amherst in 1886.
Upon her death, Dickinson’s family discovered forty handbound volumes of nearly 1,800 poems, or “fascicles” as they are sometimes called. Dickinson assembled these booklets by folding and sewing five or six sheets of stationery paper and copying what seem to be final versions of poems. The handwritten poems show a variety of dash-like marks of various sizes and directions (some are even vertical). 

Two Butterflies went out at Noon

 Two Butterflies went out at Noon—

And waltzed above a Farm— 

Then stepped straight through the Firmament 

And rested on a Beam— 

And then—together bore away

Upon a shining Sea— 

Though never yet, in any Port— 

Their coming mentioned—be— 

If spoken by the distant Bird—

If met in Ether Sea

By Frigate, or by Merchantman—

No notice—was—to me—

Emily Dickinson, 1830 - 1886