Essay and 13 Questions

POEMS by Emily Dickinson

· 1830-1886; one of the two most important figures (the other being Walt Whitman) in establishing the specific identity of AMERICAN POETRY (especially MODERN American poetry)

· from a prominent Amherst, Massachusetts, family (father a lawyer)

· After school (Amherst Academy and a year at the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary), she lived as a RECLUSE, almost never leaving the Dickinson family home.

· She remained close with her family, particularly her brother, and maintained several “friendships” via correspondences, most notably with the Boston writer and critic Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who eventually—POSTHUMOUSLY!—published her poems with the help of another of Emily’s friends, Mabel Todd Loomis.

· Only 7 of her poems were published—anonymously!—during her lifetime. THERE ARE 1,775! Not all of them reached print until 1955!

· eccentric punctuation: especially DASHES indicating emphasis and interruption

· influenced by the English Romantics, especially Keats, and the early Victorian poets, especially Elizabeth Barrett Browning

· a mixture of death, uncompromising truth, and playful humor

· ROMANTIC CHARACTERISTICS:

· sentimental melancholy

· importance/exceptionality of the poet

· the failure of knowledge/reason

· fascination with the grotesque

· mystical imagery

· unorthodox religious interpretation/beliefs

· wish to transcend worldly cares/priorities

· ROMANTIC INVERSIONS: American “Dark” Romanticism (according to literary critic Leslie Fiedler)

· disturbingly falling short of salvation (uncertainty or damnation, etc.)

· mocking the false comforts that sweet, picturesque imagery might provide

QUESTION #11:

Citing examples from her poems, discuss Dickinson’s Dark Romanticism. (3 paragraphs)

Walt Whitman

· 1819-1892; born in West Hills, Long Island, New York

· revolutionized American poetry: the long line, “catalogs,” frank subject matter, “free verse”

· responded to the call in Emerson’s “The Poet” (1842) for an all-encompassing American bard

· persona characteristics: amoral (even seeming to fatalistically excuse the atrocities associated with Manifest Destiny and colonially expansionist drive); representatively omnipresent (Transcendentally pantheistic); “American” universality and commonality represented sexually (as metaphor)

QUESTION #12:

How does both the form of Whitman’s poem and the imagery it uses reflect Emerson’s Transcendentalist call for an “American” poet?

Rebecca Harding Davis

· 1831-1910; born in Washington, Pennsylvania

· had a long career as both a fiction writer and a journalist

· “Life in the Iron-Mills” (1861) made her a literary celebrity; an early American literary example of combining REALISM, NATURALISM, and MUCK-RAKING

REALISM:

· mainly a reaction against the aesthetics and ideals of Romanticism, roughly surfacing as a consistent literary movement in the mid-19th century

· focus: a fidelity to actuality in its representation in literature (verisimilitude)

· focus: the immediate (the here and now), the specific action, detailed descriptions

· resists sentimentality

· deeply penetrating psychological characterization

· clear, direct prose

· subject matter: the central, “real” issues of life

· brutally honest

· from Davis’ “A Story of Today” (1861): “I want you to dig into this commonplace, this vulgar American life, and see what is in it. Sometimes I think it has a raw and awful significance that we do not see.”

NATURALISM:

· a later branch of Realism that manages to be even darker

· DETERMINISM: Man does not have free will, but is at the mercy of forces created by heredity and environment; characters, then, are like rats in an experiment.

· social-commentary purpose: looks at the “bigger picture” of how social/systemic forces of inequality and exploitation insidiously and incrementally work to drive individuals toward extreme and desperate behavior

MUCK-RAKING:

· a journalistic style of writing; realistically gritty

· used to expose some hidden or unaddressed social/systemic wrong or injustice for the hopeful purpose of change

QUESTION #13:

How does Davis use the Gothic toward her naturalism and muck-raking?