American Literature

3:59 AM |

Module 5: American Poetry

Reported by: Sanilyn Grace T. Zamora

Sources: Encyclopedia

World Literature

www.literarygenres.com

Walt Whitman

Edgar Allan Poe

Emily Dickinson

Robert Frost

At the end of this module the students are expected to:

1. Understand the nature of poetry;

2. Identify the American poets with their notable works;

3. Write a poem (original composition).

Introduction

Like other literatures, American literature was shaped by the history of the country that produced it. For almost a century and a half, America was merely a group of colonies scattered along the eastern seaboard of North American continent. After a successful rebellion against the motherland, America became the United States, a nation. By the end of the 19^th century, it had taken its place among the powers of the world—its fortunes so interrelated with those of other nations that inevitably it became involved in two world wars and, following these conflicts, with the problems of Europe and East Asia. Meanwhile, the rise of science and industry, as well as changes in ways of thinking and feeling, wrought modifications in people’s lives. All these factors in the development of United States molded the literature of the culture.

At the end of the 19^th century, most American poets were content to imitate past masters. Poetry was founded by Harriet Monroe in Chicago in the year 1912. Poetry became a weapon during the American Revolution, with both Loyalists and Continentals urging their forces on, stating their arguments and celebrating their heroes in verse and songs such as “Yankee Doodle,” “Nathan Hale,” and “The Epilogue,” mostly set to popular British melodies and in manner resembling other British poems of the period.

The most memorable American poet of the period was Philip Freneau, whose first well-known poems, Revolutionary War satires, served as effective propaganda; later he turned to various aspects of American scene. Although he wrote much in the stilted manner of the Neo-classicists, such poems as “The Indian Burying Ground,” “The Wild Honey Suckle,” “To a Caty-did,” and “On a Honey Bee” were romantic lyrics of real grace and feeling that were forerunners of a literary movement destined to be important in the 19^th century.

The nature of poetry

Poetry is a vast subject, as old as history and older, present wherever religion is present, possibly under some definitions—the primal and primary form of languages themselves. Poetry and of poetic thought is regarded as in some sense independent modes of the mind. Poetry is the other way of using the language. Perhaps in some hypothetical beginning of things it was the only way of using the language or simply was language tout court, prose being the derivative and younger rival. Both poetry and language are fashionably thought to have belonged to ritual in early agricultural societies; and poetry in particular, it has been claimed, arose at first in the form of magical spells recited to ensure a good harvest. Whatever the truth of this hypothesis, it blurs a useful distinction: by the time there begins to be a separate class of objects called poems, recognizable as such, these objects are no longer much regarded for their possible yam-growing properties, and such magic as they may be thought capable of has retired to do its business upon the human spirit and not directly upon the natural world outside.

Formally, poetry is recognizable by its greater dependence on at least one more parameter, the line, than appears in prose composition. This changes its appearance on the page; and it seems clear that the people take their cue from this changed appearance, reading poetry aloud in a very different voice from their habitual voice, possibly because as Ben Johnson said, “speaketh somewhat above a mortal mouth.” If, as a test of this description, people are shown poems printed as prose, it most often turns out that they will read the result as prose simply because it looks that way; which is to say that they are no longer guided in their reading by the balance and shift of the line in relation to the breath as well as the syntax. That is minimal definition but perhaps not altogether uninformative. It may be all that ought to be attempted in the way of a definition: Poetry is the way it is because it looks that way, and it looks that way because it sounds that way and vice versa.

The poet T.S. Eliot suggested that part of the difficulty lies in the fact that there is the technical term “verse” to go with the term “poetry,” while there is no equivalent technical term to distinguish the mechanical part of prose. The French poet Paul Valéry said that prose was walking, poetry dancing. Hence, the perennial squabble about distinguishing poetry from prose, which is rather like distinguishing rain from snow—everyone is reasonably capable of doing so, and yet there are some weathers that are either-neither.

List of American poets:

Richard Wilbur (1921- )

Robert Lowell (1917-1977)

Gwendolyn Brooks (1917- )

Hart Crane (1899-1932)

Stephen Vincent Benét (1898-1943)

E. E. Cummings (1894-1962)

Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950)

Marianne Moore (1887-1972)

Ezra Pound (1885-1972)

Vachel Lindsay (1879-1931)

Carl Sandburg (1878-1967)

Robert Frost (1874-1963)

Amy Lowell (1874-1925)

Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935)

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

Walt Whitman (1819-1892)

James Russell Lowell (1819-1891)

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)

John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892)

Henry Wordsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)

William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878)

Philip Freneau (1752-1832)

Edward Taylor (1642-1729)

Michael Wigglesworth (1631-1705)

Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672)

American poets and their notable works:

The poet Edwin Arlington presented his poetry as honest portraits of men who were misfits or outcasts. The words and rhythm of his poems were matched the New England speech of the day. Like Mark Twain, Robinson was also attracted to King Arthur’s England, and he wrote a number of long poems about the Knights of the Round Table. Among his works are, “The Man against the Sky,” “Tristram.”

Vachel Lindsay believed that poetry should be spoken and sung. He often travelled around the country, earning money by reciting “Abraham Lincoln Walks Booth Enters into Heaven,” “The Congo,” and others of his poems. With his colorful, musical language and his knowledge of American folk legends, Lindsay brought certain freshness to poetry.

Although Carl Sandburg was often called the Chicago poet because he celebrated that city’s strength, he was far more than a city poet. A few of Sandburg’s titles show the variety of his works: “Chicago Poems,” “Cornhuskers,” and “Good Morning, America.”

Ezra Pound headed a group of poetic experimentalists. They call themselves imagists. This means they express themselves through a series of clear, exact images, or likeness. He possessed a rare ability to recognize talent in others. From 1912 to 1919 Pound was a foreign correspondent for Poetry magazine.

The most popular poet of 19^th century was Henry Wordsworth Longfellow. His major works are three long narrative poems—that is poems that tell a story. His shorter poems are as popular as the long ones, include “The Children’s Hour,” “The Village Blacksmith,” and “The Psalm of Life.” Critics however, tend to dismiss Longfellow as a good but not a great poet. Readers have always liked him for his poem’s melody, clearness and the story content.

The poetry of Walt Whitman differed greatly from that of all other American poets of his time. His poems rarely had rhyme. The lines were of unequal length, the meter or pattern of verse was irregular. Whitman wrote in this free and flowing style because he felt it suited the democratic informality and the large, loose organization of America. Whitman was a nurse in various military hospitals; he also composed a number of touching poems about the wounded soldiers whom he was tending. At the end of the war he wrote the beautiful “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” in memory of President Lincoln. More than any other poet, Whitman comes to the closest to being the voice of American democracy.

The poetry of Emily Dickinson also a mixed gaiety and gloom. During the last 25 years of her life, she rarely left the grounds of Dickinson household in Amherst, Massachusetts. But her imagination took her on long flights of fancy. Her verses are filled with the names of faraway, exotic places that she visited only in imagination. On the other hand, she could make poetic drama out of things close at hand—a cracked plate on a shelf in the dining room or the sound of a honeybee in the garden. She was fascinated by life. She was also a little more than in love with death. Of the 1,500 poems she composed, more than 600 have to do with dying. Almost all of her poems are brief, rarely more than 12 or 15 lines long. But into small spaces she packed an emotional charge of surprising force.

Assessment: Match the right notable work with its appropriate writer.

_____Vachel Lindsay

_____Emily Dickinson

_____Henry Wordsworth Longfellow

_____Walt Whitman

_____Philip Freneau

_____Robert Frost

_____William Cullen Bryant

_____Edgar Allan Poe

a. “Leaves of Grass”

b. “To a Waterfowl”

c. “Fire and Ice”