Walt Whitman & Emily Dickinson

1. Walt Whitman & Emily Dickinson North American Literature II 1830-1886 1819-1892

2. An Intellectual Declaration of Independence 3 significant dates in American literary history • 1837, Phi Beta kappa Society, Cambridge, Massachusetts, “The American Scholar” • 1855, Walt Whitman, “The Leaves of Grass” • 1862, Thomas Wentworth Higginson received a letter from Emily Dickinson enclosing four of her poems. • Higginson’s “Letter to a Young Contributor” (The Atlantic Monthly, 1862), practical advice for novice writers: “Charge your style with life”, he commented, and went on to state that the privilege of bringing forward "new genius" was fascinating.

3. Dickinson’s letter to T. W. Higginson Mr. Higginson, Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive? The Mind is so near itself—it cannot see, distinctly—and I have none to ask— Should you think it breathed—and had you the leisure to tell me, I should feel quick gratitude— If I make the mistake—that you dared to tell me—would give me sincerer honor—toward you— I enclose my name—asking you, if you please—Sir—to tell me what is true? That you will not betray me—it is needless to ask—since Honor is it’s own pawn—

4. Walt Whitman (1819-1892) Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Influence “We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe. The spirit of the American freeman is already suspected to be timid, imitative, tame. Public and private avarice make the air we breathe thick and fat. The scholar is decent, indolent, complaisant. See already the tragic consequence. The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself. There is no work for any but the decorous and the complaisant”. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “The American Scholar” (1837)

5. Walt Whitman (1819-1892) Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Influence “The thought and the form are equal in the order of time, but in the order of genesis the thought is prior to the form. The poet has a new thought; he has a whole new experience to unfold; he will tell us how it was with him, and all men will be the richer in his fortune. For the experience of each new age requires a new confession, and the world seems always waiting for its poet”. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “The Poet” (1841)

6. Walt Whitman (1819-1892) Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Influence “All the facts of the animal economy, sex, nutriment, gestation, birth, growth, are symbols of the passage of the world into the soul of man, to suffer there a change and reappear a new and higher fact. He uses forms according to the life, and not according to the form. This is true science. The poet alone knows astronomy, chemistry, vegetation and animation, for he does not stop at these facts, but employs them as signs”. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “The Poet” (1841)

7. Walt Whitman (1819-1892) • The American Bard, The National Poet • Born in Long Island, New York. • He left school at the age of 11. • Many occupations: errand body, office body, schoolteacher, printer (compositor), house builder, journalist, book seller, writer of temperance novels, newspaper editor, poet. • Civil War: a volunteer wound-dresser • 1873 to his death: he lived the rest of his life in Camden, New Jersey: after a series of strokes, he was partially paralyzed and increasingly disabled.

8. Walt Whitman (1819-1892) Major Themes • The Preface to 1855 Leaves of Grass • The Self: individualism, labor, ordinary figures • Nature: American geography • Childhood: Memories • Death: Civil War, Old Age Years • Politics: Democracy, Abraham Lincoln • Sexuality: hetero-affection and homo-affection

9. Walt Whitman (1819-1892) Democratic Style: Form, Language • Free Verse: lines of irregular length, no metrical organization (odd meter), no rhyme • Repetitions • Alliterations and Assonances • Language: both American slangs, fancy words, foreign terms “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself; (I am large, I contain multitudes)” from Song of Myself

10. Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) • Emily Elizabeth Dickinson, born in 1830 to a prominent family, Amherst, Massachusetts • School days, Amherst Academy: focus on science (at that time, still in tandem with God) • Seclusion, 1865: not greeting guests or even leaving her bedroom later in life • Lavinia, 1890: hand-sewn books, nearly 1800 poems

12. Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) • Thomas Wentworth Higginsonwas a liberal thinker, interested in the status of women in general, and women writers in particular. • What embarrassed Higginson about the poems was his inability to classify them. In 1891, he wrote an article describing this early correspondence: "The impression of a wholly new and original poetic genius was as distinct on my mind at the first reading of these four poems as it is now, after thirty years of further knowledge; and with it came the problem never yet solved, what place ought to be assigned in literature to what is so remarkable, yet so elusive of criticism“.

13. Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) Apologists x Denigrators • Lack of Form, Lack of Title • Imperfect Rhyme • Spasmodic metrical beat • Elliptical language • Lack of Form, Lack of Title • Imperfect Rhyme • Spasmodic metrical beat • Elliptical language

14. Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) Major Themes, orTHOUGHTS • Life: home, war • Love • Nature • Science: math, geology, anatomy, botany • Time • Eternity: afterlife, God • Persona: sharp-sighted observers • Dashes as musical device