 There is a voice inside of you
That whispers all day long,
"I feel that this is right for me,
I know that this is wrong."
No teacher, preacher, parent, friend
Or wise man can decide
What's right for you -- just listen to
The voice that speaks inside.
 Shel Silverstein
 4 line stanzas
 4-3-4-3 beat
 Rhyme scheme
 Ballads tell a story in the poem
A ballad stanza in a poem
Has lines as long as these.
In measuring the lines, we find
We get both fours and threes.
A
Bal
Has
Lad
Stan
Za
In
Lines As
Long
As
these.
In
Mea
Sur
Ing
The
Lines, We
We
Get
Both
Fours And
three
s
A
Poem
Find
God prosper long our noble
king,
Our liffes and saftyes all!
A woefull hunting once
there did
In Chevy Chase befall..
The fair breeze blew, the
white foam f lew,
The furrows followed free;
We were the first that ever
burst
Into that silent sea.
The brain is deeper than
the sea,
For, hold them, blue to
blue,
The one the other will
absorb
As sponges, buckets do.
She dwelt among the untrodden
ways
Beside the springs of Dove,
A Maid whom there were none to
praise
And very few to love.
O where hae you been, Lord Randal, my son?
And where hae you been, my handsome young man?
Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?
Oh, where have you been, my darling young
one?
Amazing grace! How sweet the
sound
That saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost, but now I’m
found,
Was blind, but now I see.
 Wrote 1775 poems!
 Only 7 published before her death
 After a normal childhood, she slowly become more
isolated from the world.
 Amherst, Massachusetts
 Because I Could Not Stop For Death
 Much Madness
 I Heard A Fly Buzz – When I Died
 Hope Is A Thing With Feathers
 "Hope" is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings the tune without the words
And never stops at all,
 And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.
 I've heard it in the chillest land
And on the strangest sea,
Yet never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.
 By: Emily Dickinson
 New York
 Formal schooling ended at age 11
 Editor of newspapers
 Traveled all over the United States
 Collection of Whitman’s poetry
 “Song of Myself”
 Made up of 52 parts (a year)
 speaker for American people
 Introduced free verse
 Employs chant and ordinary speech
 Themes include
 Sacredness of self
 Death as part of cycle of life
 Equality of all beings
 Free Verse
 P. 442: Song of Myself
 Cadence
 Run of words that rise and fall to make emphasis of
thought
 Catalogs - long lists of related things, people, or
events.
 P. 448: I Hear America Singing
 No Rhymes
 One difference is the way
they structured their
poems. Basically, the
structures of Whitman’s
poems are the lack of any
structure.
 Whitman’s poems tend to
run on and on; there was
no set length for his
poems, stanzas, or even
lines.
 Dickinson, on the other
hand, wrote poems with
a definite structure. She
wrote ballad stanzas,
which were four line
stanzas alternating in
iambic tetrameter and
tri-meter.
 As with structure,
Whitman’s poetry has no
rhyme. In this way
Whitman also breaks
from tradition.
 Whitman’s poems make
use of free verse. This is
poetry that is written
without concern for
regular rhyme schemes
and meter.
 Dickinson’s poems,
unlike Whitman’s,
make use of slant
rhyme. This is the use
of near or approximate
rhymes, and is a
relatively modern idea.
 One of the poetic “tools”
which Whitman uses is
cataloguing, or
enumeration.
 Catalogs are long lists of
related things, people, or
events.
 One of Dickinson’s
modern “tools” is her use
of startling imagery.
 Typical of her writing are
the use of dashes that
break the lines, and serve
to keep them open.
 Most of her poems are
short, but they take you
on an infinite trip; they
look simple enough, but
what you see is not what
you get.
 They are alike in the fact that they are not necessarily
transcendentalists, but often express transcendentalist
views in their poems
 Even though both lived during the time of realism they
interpret nature through their poetry and use poetry as a
vehicle to participate in nature’s beauty and
transcendentalism.
 They both find inspiration from nature and find an
expression or reflection of the soul in nature.