The Age of Poets After Romanticism: What next? Where does everything fit in?

After the Civil War  Dealing with the initial shock of Lincoln’s assassination  Reconstruction  Tension is still high between the Union and Confederacy  It is a transitional point for the US  Some consider this, literarily, an age of enlightenment

Age of Poets  The time between is generally regarded as “The Age of Poets”  Many great American poets start showing up in history  Robert Frost, TS Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane  There are 2 poets that started us out in this era, though

Emily Dickinson  12/10/1830 – 5/15/1886  Two siblings: Lavina and Austin  Amherst Academy: English studies  Up until her late twenties, stayed with her immediate family  Bedridden with chronic illness from late 1850s until her death in 1886

Dickinson cont.  She lived in her parents’ upstairs bedroom for practically the rest of her life  Correspondence letters to her friend Susan Gilbert and others (300+ letters)  Did not leave her room/house from (most productive writing)  Instructed her sister, Lavina, to burn all of her letters upon her death (nothing about her poetry)  200+ poems

Slant Rhyme  Rhyming where consonance occurs within the last syllables of the two (or more) words in question  Not the whole word  Often called “half-rhyming”  Hope is the thing with feathers  That perches in the soul,  And sings the tune without the words,  And never stops at all. Dickinson is famous for this rhyme scheme

Walt Whitman  5/31/1819 – 3/26/1892  Long Island, NY  Named “Walt” to distinguish him from his father  Spent most of his life working for newspapers – Long Island Democrat, Brooklyn Eagle

Whitman cont.  Whitman decided he was done with the “usual rewards”  Decided he would be a poet  Began writing “the great American epic”  Leaves of Grass was started in 1850  Rewrote his poetry, edited his “masterwork” over the next 33 years  The “deathbed edition” was published months before his death, March 26, 1892.

Free Verse  A form of poetry that refrains from meter or musical patterns and rhyme  Whitman is not the creator; rather, he is credited with bringing it to the forefront  “Have you reckon'd a thousand acres much? have you reckon'd the earth much? Have you practis'd so long to learn to read? Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?”  Whitman typically makes it melodic and have a sense of form, though