American Masters: Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson H OW H ISTORY I NFLUENCES T EXTS

W ALT W HITMAN (1819 – 1892)  One of the most influential poets in the American canon  Called “the father of free verse,” but he did not invent it  Concerned with politics, opposed to slavery

P HILOSOPHICAL / P OLITICAL A SSUMPTIONS Whitman’s Poetry...  Presents all humans as brothers and sisters (an egalitarian view of the races)  Celebrates America’s democratic spirit and the heroism within common Americans  Has a distinctly American voice (he is called America’s first “poet of democracy”)

S TYLE  Breaks the boundaries of poetic form and is generally prose-like  Includes unusual images and symbols, such as rotting leaves, tufts of straw, and debris  “Taboo” subjects such as death and sexuality are discussed openly

W HITMAN ’ S P OETIC E LEMENTS  Cadence – the natural, rhythmic rise and fall of language as it is normally spoken  Catalog poem – a list of things, people, events or ideas  Free verse – poetry without rhyme or meter  Repetition – repeating words, sounds, syllables, or other elements

E MILY D ICKINSON (1830 – 1886)  Published only seven poems during her lifetime, and even these were significantly altered by publishers to bring them in line with conventional poetic rules of the time  Most of her remaining poems (nearly 1800 of them) discovered in attic after her death  Editors and critics were skeptical of her talent during her lifetime and into the early 20 th century  Now considered to be a major American poet

P HILOSOPHICAL / P OLITICAL A SSUMPTIONS  Left no formal statement of her aesthetic intentions  Her work does not conveniently fit into any one genre  Her poetry often deals with themes of death and immortality

S TYLE  No titles  Short lines  Slant rhymes  Unconventional capitalization & punctuation  Extensive use of dashes  Idiosyncratic vocabulary and imagery

T YPES OF POEMS  Flower / Garden: in these poems, flowers are often symbols of emotions or actions  Master (or Signor): many poems address an unnamed “Master,” “Sir,” or “Signor,” who she calls her “lover for all eternity”  Morbidity: numerous poems reveal fascination with illness, dying, and death  Gospel: poems addressed to Christ or concerned with his teachings  Landscape of the Spirit: poems describe conversations with her own soul or visits to an imaginary landscape where her soul or spirit reside

D ICKINSON ’ S P OETIC E LEMENTS  Analogy – A comparison made between two things to show how they are alike  Irony – A discrepancy between appearances and reality  Slant rhyme – A rhyming sound that is not exact

C OMMON P OETIC E LEMENTS  Imagery – the use of language to evoke a picture or a concrete sensation of a person, thing, place, or experience  Symbol – A person, place, thing or event that has meaning in itself and also stands for something more than itself  Metaphor – A figure of speech that compares two unlike things without using like, as, than or resembles  Simile – A figure of speech that compares two unlike things using like, as, than, or resembles  Personification – A figure of speech in which an object or animal is given human feelings, thoughts, or attitudes