Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)

1. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) The most popular American poet of the 19th century

3. Biographical Facts • born in Portland, Maine. His father was a Portland lawyer and congressman. • went to school when he was only three years old • studied at Bowdoin College • traveled and study in Europe • Taught as a professor at Harvard and achieved a significant result in literary field.

4. Two reasons for Longfellow's popularity • He had the gift of easy rhyme. He wrote poetry as a bird sings, with natural grace and melody. • He wrote on obvious themes and in plain language which appeal to all kinds of people. There is a joyousness in them, a spirit of optimism and faith in the goodness of life which evokes immediate response in the emotions of his readers.

5. American Themes Americans owe a great debt to Longfellow because he was among the first of American writers to use native themes. He wrote about the American scene and landscape, the American Indian ('Song of Hiawatha'), and American history and tradition ('The Courtship of Miles Standish', 'Evangeline').

6. Honors and Reputation • He received honorary degrees from famous colleges and universities, including Cambridge and Oxford. • After death, Longfellow became the only American to be honored with a bust in the Poet’s Corner of Westminster Abbey.

7. Longfellow’s Styles Longfellow’s poems are noted for their • Gentleness and sweetness • Treat traditional poetic themes as family, children, idealized love and friendship, with traditional poetic techniques – regular meters and feet, regular rhyming scheme, and traditional symbols and metaphors.

8. Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) An American lyrical poet, and an obsessively private writer -- only seven of her some 1800 poems were published during her lifetime.

9. Walt Whitman (1819 - 1892) American poet, journalist and essayist

10. Bard of democracy, America's • Representative of everyman, • The first truly American writer, • “Good grey poet"

11. Powerful rhetoric of Whitman’s poetry • He wrote in peculiarly American speech patterns – He speaks for the common American people. • He embodies Emerson’s ideal of self-reliance. • He wrote in a style of rare freshness and vividness, of delicacy and wonder.

12. Distinctive Features of Whitman’s Poetry • He broke away from the traditional rhyming schemes and wrote in the form of free verse – no regular lines and stanzas, no regular rhythm, phrase rather than foot being the unit of rhythm

13. Distinctive Features of Whitman’s Poetry • He employed the technique of repetition, or phonetic recurrence, to make his poems coherent and musical. • He employed the technique of repetition, or phonetic recurrence, to make his poems coherent and musical. • He used catalogue -- a list of things in parallelism

14. Dickinson withdrew from social contact at the age of 23 and devoted herself in secret into writing.

15. Family Background • Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, to a family well known for educational and political activity. • Her father, an orthodox Calvinist, was a lawyer and treasurer of Amherst College, and also served in Congress.

16. Education She was educated at • Amherst Academy (1834-47) • Mount Holyoke Female Seminary (1847-48).

17. Starting Writing Poems • Around 1850 Dickinson started to write poems, first in fairly conventional style, but after ten years of practice she began to give room for experiments.

18. A Lady in White After the Civil War, Dickinson • restricted her contacts outside Amherst to exchange of letters, • dressed only in white and saw few of the visitors who came to meet her. • In fact, most of her time she spent in her room.

19. A Secluded poet • Although she lived a secluded life, her letters reveal great knowledge of the writings of English and American classic poets, novelists, such as John Keats, John Ruskin, and Sir Thomas Browne and the Bible.

20. Emotional life Dickinson's emotional life remains mysterious, despite much speculation about a possible disappointed love affair. Two candidates have been presented: • Reverend Charles Wadsworth, with whom she corresponded, • Samuel Bowles, editor of the Springfield Republican, to whom she addressed many poems.

21. Publication of Poems • After her death in 1886, her sister Lavinia brought out her poems. She engaged Mabel Loomis Todd, a family friend, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a personal correspondent and early literary advisor of Dickinson’s, to edit the poems and see to their publication. The first poem collection, which contains 450 poems, was published in 1890

22. In the early decades of the twentieth century, Martha Dickinson Bianchi, the poet's niece, transcribed and published more poems, and in 1945 Bolts Of Melody essentially completed the task of bringing Dickinson's poems to the public. The publication of Thomas H. Johnson's 1955 edition of Emily Dickinson's poems finally gave readers a complete and accurate text. Publication of Her Poems

23. Themes of Dickinson’s Poems 1. Death About one third of the total collection of her poems deal with death. Aiken: “Death, and the problem of life after death, obsessed her. She seems to have thought of it constantly – She died all her life, she probed death daily. Sometimes she was an outsider, observing death; sometimes she was observing her own death.

24. Themes of Dickinson’s Poems 2. Love (120 poems) Although she remained a spinster until her death, she undoubtedly experienced the sweetness and bitterness of love.

25. Themes of Dickinson’s Poems 3. Nature (300 poems) She is familiar with nature intimately and described in a minute way. Nature is benevolent and pleasant, but also cruel and indifferent.

26. Her Unconventional Poetic Style • Diction • Words of Latin and Greek origin -- for ideas • Concrete Saxon element -- fpr [erce[topms

27. Her Unconventional Poetic Style 2. Image Chang Yaoxin:”In the best of her poems every word is a picture seen.” Her pursuit of economy of expression, laconic brevity, descriptive directness marked her as one of the precursors of the Imagist Movement.

28. Her Unconventional Poetic Style 3. Grammar • frequent use of dashes, • sporadic capitalization of nouns, • off-rhymes, • broken metre, • unconventional metaphors She is one of the most innovative poets of 19th-century American literature.

29. Dickinson’s Style Dickinson's works has considerable influence on modern poetry. She is known for her • frequent use of dashes, • sporadic capitalization of nouns, • off-rhymes, • broken metre, • unconventional metaphors She is one of the most innovative poets of 19th-century American literature.