15. Walt Whitman& Emily Dickinson and their poetry
Walter "Walt" Whitman (May 31, 1819 - March 26, 1892) was an American poet, essayist and journalist. A humanist, he was a part of the transition between transcendentalism and realism, incorporating both views in his works. Whitman is among the most influential poets in the American canon, often called the father of free verse.[1] His work was very controversial in its time, particularly his poetry collection Leaves of Grass, which was described as obscene for its overt sexuality.
Whitman's work breaks the boundaries of poetic form and is generally prose-like.[1] He also used unusual images and symbols in his poetry, including rotting leaves, tufts of straw, and debris.[104] He also openly wrote about death and sexuality, including prostitution.[83] He is often labeled as the father of free verse, though he did not invent it.[1]
Poetic theory
Whitman wrote in the preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, "The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it." He believed there was a vital, symbiotic relationship between the poet and society. This connection was emphasized especially in "Song of Myself" by using an all-powerful first-person narration. As an American epic, it deviated from the historic use of an elevated hero and instead assumed the identity of the common people. Leaves of Grass also responded to the impact that recent urbanization in the United States had on the masses.
Emily Dickinson's Major themes
Dickinson left no formal statement of her aesthetic intentions and, because of the variety of her themes, her work does not fit conveniently into any one genre. She has been regarded, alongside Emerson (whose poems Dickinson admired), as a Transcendentalist. However, Farr disagrees with this analysis saying that Dickinson's "relentlessly measuring mind ... deflates the airy elevation of the Transcendental".Apart from the major themes discussed below, Dickinson's poetry frequently uses humor, puns, irony and satire.
Flowers and gardens. Farr notes that Dickinson's "poems and letters almost wholly concern flowers" and that allusions to gardens often refer to an "imaginative realm ... wherein flowers [are] often emblems for actions and emotions". She associates some flowers, like gentians and anemones, with youth and humility; others with prudence and insight. Her poems were often sent to friends with accompanying letters and nosegays. Farr notes that one of Dickinson's earlier poems, written about 1859, appears to "conflate her poetry itself with the posies": "My nosegays are for Captives - / Dim - long expectant eyes - / Fingers denied the plucking, / Patient till Paradise - / To such, if they sh'd whisper / Of morning and the moor - / They bear no other errand, / And I, no other prayer".
The Master poems. Dickinson left a large number of poems addressed to "Signor", "Sir" and "Master", who is characterized as Dickinson's "lover for all eternity". These confessional poems are often "searing in their self-inquiry" and "harrowing to the reader" and typically take their metaphors from texts and paintings of Dickinson's day. The Dickinson family themselves believed these poems were addressed to actual individuals but this view is frequently rejected by scholars. Farr, for example, contends that the Master is an unattainable composite figure, "human, with specific characteristics, but godlike" and speculates that Master may be a "kind of Christian muse".
Morbidity. Dickinson's poems reflect her "early and lifelong fascination" with illness, dying and death. Perhaps surprisingly for a New England spinster, her poems allude to death by many methods: "crucifixion, drowning, hanging, suffocation, freezing, premature burial, shooting, stabbing and guillotinage". She reserved her sharpest insights into the "death blow aimed by God" and the "funeral in the brain", often reinforced by images of thirst and starvation. Dickinson scholar Vivian Pollak considers these references an autobiographical reflection of Dickinson's "thirsting-starving persona", an outward expression of her needy self-image as small, thin and frail. Dickinson's most psychologically complex poems explore the theme that the loss of hunger for life causes the death of self and place this at "the interface of murder and suicide".
Gospel poems. Throughout her life, Dickinson wrote poems reflecting a preoccupation with the teachings of Jesus Christ and, indeed, many are addressed to him. She stresses the Gospels' contemporary pertinence and recreates them, often with "wit and American colloquial language".Scholar Dorothy Oberhaus finds that the "salient feature uniting Christian poets ... is their reverential attention to the life of Jesus Christ" and contends that Dickinson's deep structures place her in the "poetic tradition of Christian devotion" alongside Hopkins, Eliot and Auden. In a Nativity poem, Dickinson combines lightness and wit to revisit an ancient theme: "The Savior must have been / A docile Gentleman - / To come so far so cold a Day / For little Fellowmen / The Road to Bethlehem / Since He and I were Boys / Was leveled, but for that twould be / A rugged billion Miles -".
The Undiscovered Continent. Academic Suzanne Juhasz considers that Dickinson saw the mind and spirit as tangible visitable places and that for much of her life she lived within them.[146] Often, this intensely private place is referred to as the "undiscovered continent" and the "landscape of the spirit" and embellished with nature imagery. At other times, the imagery is darker and forbidding—castles or prisons, complete with corridors and rooms—to create a dwelling place of "oneself" where one resides with one's other selves. An example that brings together many of these ideas is: "Me from Myself - to banish - / Had I Art - / Impregnable my Fortress / Unto All Heart - / But since myself—assault Me - / How have I peace / Except by subjugating / Consciousness. / And since We're mutual Monarch / How this be / Except by Abdication - / Me - of Me?".
17. The founders of American modern poetry E.L. Masters, R. Jeffers, C. Sandburg.
EDGAR LEE MASTERS (1868 - 1950)
Life:
He was born in Texas and reared in southern Illinois.He attended Knox Collage, studied law and became attorney. He gave up law practice and devoted himself entirely to literature.
He moved to New York, for 20 years he occupied a suite at the famed Hotel Chelsea, heaven of many writers of the 20's and 30's. He is buried in Petersburg, next to his beloved grandparents Squire Davie Masters and Lucinda Masters.
The epitaph of Master's tomb
“Tomorrow is My Birthday”
“Spoon River Anthology” (1915)
It was literary sensation.
It was written in the form of epitaphs - poignant summaries of the lives of persons supposedly buried in the country cemetery (nearly 250 characters). The poems are in free verse, the lines conveying a unit of thought (conversational speech, more shaped then common speech).
Most of the speakers reveal brief and bitter tales of twisted and wasted lives.
But some, like Lucinda Matlock, speak with courage, conviction, optimism.
Speakers of Spoon River
The speakers are inhabitants (both real are imagined) of Spoon River, an area near Lewinstown and Petersburg, Illinois, where Masters spent his childhood.
Some characters under disguise names, lately dead or still living in the region, scandalous behavior of some of them (judges, bankers, doctor, editors, churchmen, artists, night watch, atheist, hat maker, gambler, a Negro, Anne Rutledge, first love of A. Lincoln, etc.).
All are dead, “sleeping on the hill”. They died accidentally, violent or unnoticed death.
The discover and confess the real motives of their lives, the secret steps that stumbled them to failure or raised them to illusionary triumphs.
They talk about meaningless marriages, accidents and disease, economic exportation, incapability, damaged lives.
Death and darkness grant them the revelatory eyes for recognition of their own souls.
Masters in “Spoon River Anthology”
Masters clearly defends the characters - not against their sins, petty or great, for these they readily confess themselves - but against the punishments and inequalities life fixes upon us all.
The epitaphs are ironic an extremely objective.
Flaws of “Spoon River Anthology”
It is bigger, more inclusive than need to be.
The graveyard is overpopulated.
Some headstones seem repetitious.
There is stiffness of some verses.
The poems resemble a statement-like recitations and seem formal.
The poems are sometimes unintentionally ludicrous (provoking laughter, ridiculous, comic).
ROBINSON JEFFERS (1887 - 1962)
His father was a professor of Old Testament, literature and theology, his mother - a church organist. He was born in Pittsburgh. At the age of 15 Jeffers was fluent in Greek, Latin, French, Italian, German (educated in boarding schools in Europe). Robinson was also highly educated in the USA, studied medicine and forestry. He lived on the coast of California, where he built a granite house and a tower on cliffs facing the sea.
His Poetry:
Flagons and Apples (1912)
Californians (1916)
Tamar and Other Poems (1924)
Hungerfield and Other Poems (1954), moving eulogy to Una Call Kuster with her in California, his muse and partner.
Beauty of his descriptions of the natural world - early environmentalist, perhaps the first to grasp the devastating extent of changes of human technologies and populations had on the rest of earth biological life.
Some pessimisms of human culture: human culture is destructive and out of control.
He wanted us to rediscover our relationship with the foundations of nature.
He insisted that human kind should acknowledge the superior value of the instinctive life.
“Inhumanism”
Jeffers's assertion that mankind was too egocentric, too unmoved by the “astonishing beauty of things”.
“The Double Axe” - defined “inhumanism” criticized the Allie's role in WW II - putting Roosevelt and Churchill on the same moral level as Hitler and Mussolini.
“Divinely Superfluous Beauty”
Vision of the spontaneous energy running through all things.
Wish to be indentified with this energy, to become one with what is “divinely superfluous”, “The incredible beauty of joy. Stars with the fire the joining of lips.”
“The Burial Place”
Union between himself and nature complete ………………………………..
“put me in a beautiful place far off from men ……………………………….. cemetery I should be pleased to lie in one grave with'em” (the quick deer, the lonely puma).
The human animal is absurd and petty, everything appears small in contrast to the enigmatic beauty, the intrinsic perfection of nature. We have to return to earth, our origin.
Jeffers's impact
Depends upon PERSPECTIVE.
Human life is seen from an immense distance, as it were placed within the larger dimensions of earth, sea, and sky.
Colloquial speech, first conflict, then union between human nature and nature
Recognition of the needs and limits of the human character.
CARL SANDBURG (1878 - 1967)
Life:
Sandburg was a son of poor Swedish immigrants. He had to quit school at 13 to begin working.
He roamed over Kansas, Nebraska and Colorado working as a truck handler, harvest hand, dishwasher, brick maker, porter, janitor, milkman, among other jobs.
He worked as a war correspondent during Spanish-American War.
He completed four years at Lombard College in Galesburg but did not graduate.
In 1908, he became a political organizer for the Social Democrats. He served as a secretary to the mayor of Milwaukee. He went back to newspaper work.
Poet, folksinger and journalist.
Poetry:
He spoke for the common man and woman.
The Chicago Poems (1916) followed by
Cornhuskers (1918) raised him to a position of leadership among the Chicago Renaissance group (T. Dreiser, V. Lindsay, S. Anderson)
He traveled about the US and collected folk songs which he published in The American Songbag containing 280 songs and ballads which he collected from convicts, cowboys and farmers.
He was an admirer of A. Lincoln and published a monumental biography of his hero. (The Prairie Years, two volumes, The War Years, four volumes).
Subjects of his poems
His poems celebrate:
work and the worker
men and women alike
arrogance, coarseness, and vitality of a young notion.
The People, Yes (1936)
“Chicago”
It is his best known poem.
It was first published in Poetry Magazine in 1914.
It is filled with vigorous imagery which bombards the senses of the reader.
“Happiness”
“Anna Imroth”
“Fog”
18. Imagism
Imagism was a movement in early 20th-century Anglo-American poetry that favored precision of imagery and clear, sharp language. The Imagists rejected the sentiment and discursiveness typical of much Romantic and Victorian poetry. This was in contrast to their contemporaries, the Georgian poets, who were by and large content to work within that tradition. Group publication of work under the Imagist name appearing between 1914 and 1917 featured writing by many of the most significant figures in Modernist poetry in English, as well as a number of other Modernist figures prominent in fields other than poetry.
Based in London, the Imagists were drawn from Great Britain, Ireland and the United States. Somewhat unusually for the time, the Imagists featured a number of women writers among their major figures. Imagism is also significant historically as the first organised Modernist English language literary movement or group.
At the time Imagism emerged, Longfellow and Tennyson were considered the paragons of poetry, and the public valued the sometimes moralising tone of their writings. In contrast, Imagism called for a return to what were seen as more Classical values, such as directness of presentation and economy of language, as well as a willingness to experiment with non-traditional verse forms. The focus on the "thing" as "thing" (an attempt at isolating a single image to reveal its essence) also mirrors contemporary developments in avant-garde art, especially Cubism. Although Imagism isolates objects through the use of what Ezra Pound called "luminous details", Pound's Ideogrammic Method of juxtaposing concrete instances to express an abstraction is similar to Cubism's manner of synthesizing multiple perspectives into a single image.
“Image is sth that presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time” - Ezra Pound.
objective correlative - expressing emotion through “a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events” T.S. Eliot. In the “love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock “ by T.S. Eliot
poet focuses on strong, concrete images
a poet concentrates on an image and is to objectively present an intellectual and emotional reaction caused by a simple object, experience or phenomenon without referring to abstraction or clichés
In a few words: Imagism - Imagism was a literary movement that flourished between 1912 and 1927. Led by Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell, the Imagist poets rejected nineteenth-century poetic forms and language. Instead, they wrote short poems that used ordinary language and free verse to create sharp, exact, concentrated pictures.