Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson:
A New American Poetry
If you want me again look for me
under your boot-soles.
- Whitman
This is my letter to the world
That never wrote to me-- Dickinson
Walt Whitman
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Grew up in Brooklyn
The Civil War
Leaves of Grass
Whitman’s image:
heroic, epic
Major themes
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Celebration of Self
Attention to Detail of the Natural World
Observation and Experience=Education
Willingness to Face the Seemingly Ugly
Commonality of Human Experience
Celebration of “the Procreant Urge of the
World”
• Celebration of the Given Moment
Guiding Questions
• How can we situate Whitman’s poetry in
the context of Transcendentalism?
• How does it express themes or
philosophies similar to those of Emerson
and Thoreau?
• How does it differ?
“Song of Myself,” section 1
• What kinds of repetition do we find in this section? How do they help
create the rhythms and music in Whitman’s free verse?
• Who is “you” in lines 2 and 3?
• What is the connection between the “soul” and the “spear of summer
grass”?*
• Why do you think the speaker is holding “creeds” and “schools” in
abeyance?
• We can read this opening section as a kind of declaration of intent
for the “song” that will follow. Who is the speaker? What does he
propose to do? What do you think his “song” is going to be about?
*(One thing to keep in mind: the grass is used as a formal
structuring device throughout the poem. Note the different ways in
which Whitman uses grass throughout “Song of Myself.”)
“O Me, O Life!
O me! O life!... of the questions of these recurring;
Of the endless trains of the faithless—of cities fill’d with the foolish;
Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and
who more faithless?)
Of eyes that vainly crave the light—of the objects mean—of the
struggle ever renew’d;
Of the poor results of all—of the plodding and sordid crowds I see
around me;
Of the empty and useless years of the rest—with the rest me
intertwined;
The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me,
O life?
Answer.
That you are here—that life exists, and identity;
That the powerful play goes on, and you will contribute a verse.
- Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
Whitman and Dead Poets Society
1. In the first scene we watched, Mr. Keating
quotes the above poem during a lecture to his
students about poetry.
– What is his point in this lecture?
– To which of the themes of Whitman’s poetry does
Mr. Keating’s point relate?
2. In the second scene, Mr. Keating refers to
Whitman’s famous declaration regarding his
“barbaric yawp.”
– What does the yawp stand for in this scene?
– How is it similar to or different from what the yawp
stands for in section 52 of “Song of Myself”?
“Song of Myself,” section 2
• What lines in this section support Whitman’s credo that
observation and experience=education?
The last stanza:
Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of
all poems,
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions
of suns left,)
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look
through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.
• Analyze the sounds of the above stanza—note the
Bibilical echoes, the repetition, the prophetic quality of
the poet’s promise.
“Song of Myself,” section 6
• The answer to the child’s question (What
is the grass?) is in many ways the entire
poem.
• What sorts of things does the poet identify
the grass as in this section?
“Song of Myself,” section 10
• In each of the stanzas in this section, the
speaker observes a different American scene.
Where does each scene take place? What’s
going on in the scene?
• What is the tone of each of the five stanzas in
this poem?
• When does the tone of the poem change? Why
might this be?
• What do you think Whitman’s point might have
been in writing about these five very different
scenes in the same poem? What theme or
themes from Whitman does this poem address?
Photograph by Phillips &
Taylor, Philadelphia. 1873.
• Section 11
– The 29th bather??? [also look back at section 5 and
forward to 21]
• Section 17
“This is the grass that grows wherever the land is and
the water is,
This is the common air that bathes the globe.”
• Section 21
“I am the poet of the body, and I am the poet of the soul”
• Section 24
“Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a
kosmos…”
• Section 26
“I think I will do nothing for a long time but listen…”
• Section 33
– Repetition of “I am”
– “I understand the large hearts of heroes…”
– “Mind not me…mind…the entrenchments.”
(Remember that Whitman worked as a nurse in the
military hospitals in Washington during the Civil
War…)
• Section 51
– “Do I contradict myself?”
• Section 52
– the barbaric yawp
– the last line (and the first line)
Form of Whitman
• Free verse (irregular line length; prose quality with lyric
style)
• Parallel structure / repetitive rhythms
• Sweeping catalogues
• Cadence (rhythmic rise and fall of language as naturally
spoken)
• Colloquial, everyday diction
• Use of sound devices: assonance, alliteration,
onomatopoeia
Consider the above formal aspects of Whitman’s
poetry—analyze them. What do they say about Whitman
as a poet? How does his form relate to his content?
Original Title
• “Song of Myself” was originally titled
"Poem of Walt Whitman, an American“—
what light does this shed on Whitman’s
intentions in the poem?
Whitman’s Notebooks
• The notebook fragment we looked at
yesterday—“Small in theme, yet has it the
sweep of the universe”—could be interpreted to
represent one idea Whitman had about his
poetry: the desire to explore universal themes
using specific, sensory details from his own
experience.
• You will be divided up into 4 groups. Each group
will be given a set of primary sources—a poem,
copies of relevant pages from Whitman’s
notebooks, and a Civil War-era photograph.
Whitman’s Notebooks
• You will then write a short paragraph which does
two things:
• Analyzes the poem itself in comparison to “Song of
Myself.” What themes do you see repeated? How
is the form similar or different?
• Analyzes the relationships among the primary
sources. What light do they shed on each other?
For example, what echoes of the notes and
fragments jotted down by Whitman in his notebook
pages do you find in the poem? How does the
photograph help to contextualize the poem and
notebook pages?
• You will present your findings to the class
tomorrow.
Poem 465
1. What is the dramatic situation of this poem?
2. Briefly paraphrase the statement made in the
poem.
3. According to stanza 2, what are the dying
person and those around her expecting to find
in the room? What appears instead?
4. Why is “Heaves” an appropriate word to use in
line 4, in regard to what is happening in the
poem?
5. What poetic techniques (think form here) does
Dickinson use in lines 12 and 13?
6. What do you think is the overall message or
purpose of the poem?
Poem 712
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How is death personified?
Why, in line 14, does the narrator feel “quivering and chill”? What is she
wearing?
What is the “house” in line 17?
What has the speaker surmised, or guessed, in the last stanza?
How would you describe the tone of the first stanza? What word signals
this tone?
Of all the things Dickinson might have had the carriage pass, why do you
think she chooses the children and the grain in stanza 3?
What is one message this poem might be sending about life and death?
Some readers think the concluding stanza introduces a tone of terror,
because the speaker has suddenly realized that she will ride on forever,
conscious of being dead. Some think that the whole poem is an
expression of trust and even triumph. With which interpretation do you
agree, and why?
The critic Alfred Kazin has said of the last stanza: “What that famous Eternity is,
we cannot say.”
Explain what you think Dickinson meant by the Eternity the horses were going
toward.
Poem 449 (“I died for beauty”)
• What’s the dramatic situation of the poem, as described
in the first stanza?
• There are two instances of slant rhyme in this poem.
What are they?
• Look back at your answer to #2. What is the effect of
slant rhyme on the poem? Why do you think Dickinson
might have employed slant rhyme here?
• Take a stab at what you believe to be the larger
message that Dickinson seems to be trying to get across
here (hint: you’ll need to address the relationship
between truth and beauty as expressed in stanza 2).
Poem 1129 (“Tell all the Truth”)
• The second stanza of the poem might be confusing
because it employs inverted word order and omits some
words. Rephrase the lines in your own words in the
space below—be sure not to change the meaning of the
lines.
• Some people think these 8 lines express the essence of
Dickinson’s own poetry. How can we interpret this poem
as an ars poetica[1] for her poetry as a whole?
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[1] Ars poetica: Literally, “Art of poetry”: a summary
description, written in verse by a poet, of how poems
are, and ought to be, constructed—and implicitly, what a
poem is. An example of an ars poetica would be
Archibald MacLeish’s “A poem must not mean / But be.”
Poem 303 (The soul selects her own society)
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Recap of poem
Dickinson’s original editors changed the word
valves in line 11 to lids. How does this change
the metaphor? How does it change your image
of what is happening?
Look carefully at the meter of lines 10 and 12.
How does the rhythmical pattern of these lines
differ from the corresponding lines in the first
and second stanzas? What is the effect of this
difference?
Slant rhyme…
Slant Rhyme:
Exact Rhyme:
I’ve known her—from an
ample nation—
Choose One—
Then—close the Valves of
her attention—
Like Stone—
I’ve known her—from an
ample nation—
Choose One—
Then—close the Valves of
her attention—
And be done—
What difference is made with the exact rhyme? What is lost, in
terms of meaning, tone, feeling?
Slant Rhyme
• Remember, slant rhyme is a kind of offrhyme or half-rhyme.
• Why use slant rhyme?
– Shock value
– Unpredictability
– Emphasis
done
Terms
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Caesura
Dramatic situation
Assonance, consonance, onomatopoeia, alliteration
Synecdoche (also metonymy)
Synesthesia
Slant rhyme
persona
Run-on and end-stopped lines
Ars poetica
cadence
Review for Test
• Poetry terms
– consult the handout and your notes
– remember that we added some terms to that
handout in class
• Author bios and background info
• Quotations
– You just have to know the author, not the title
or poem number
• Interpreting a poem
• Short Answer (very brief paragraph)