Walt Whitman and
Emily Dickinson
“Tell the truth, but tell it slant.”
Founders of a uniquely American
poetic voice
“I sound my barbaric yawp over
the roofs of the world.”
Walt Whitman
• Born May 31, 1819
• Read voraciously and studied Shakespeare, Homer,
Dante and the Bible.
• In 1836, began a career as a teacher in a one-room
school house on Long Island in New York.
• In 1841, decided to try journalism and wrote for the
local papers.
• In 1855, he took out a copyright for his first edition
of a book of poetry, Leaves of Grass.
• Released a second edition of Leaves of Grass in 1856.
• Struggled to support himself throughout his life.
• 1870’s he suffers a stroke and lives with his brother until
the 1882 publication of Leaves of Grass gave Whitman
enough money to buy his own home.
• Died March 26, 1892.
Walt Whitman
About his Poetry
• In his poetry, Whitman wanted to show the new
America he saw growing around him.
• Just as America was very different politically and
practically from its European counterparts so must
American poetry stand out from previous models.
• His poetic structures reflect his democratic ideals.
He uses lists as a way to bring together a wide variety of
items without imposing a hierarchy on them.
• Perception, rather than analysis, is the basis for this kind
of poetry, which uses few metaphors or other kinds of
symbolic language.
Emily Dickinson
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Born in Amherst, Mass. In 1830.
Attended one year of college and became homesick.
Throughout her life, she rarely left home.
She fell in love with the Rev. Charles Wadsworth who
she met on a trip to Philadelphia. He moved to the west
coast after visiting her in 1860. She never married.
Dickinson read widely and isolated herself from the
outside world. She loved to write letters and kept up
correspondence with many friends and relatives.
She loved to spend time with family.
Her poems reflect her loneliness and spirituality.
She admired the poets Robert and Elizabeth Barrett
Browning as well as John Keats.
She and Whitman are connected forever as the
founders of a uniquely American poetic voice.
Died in 1886 in Amherst.
Emily Dickinson
Emily Dickinson, whose odd and inventive poems helped to
initiate modern poetry, is an enigma, a mystery, a paradox.
Only ten of her poems were published in her lifetime. We know of
her work only because her sister and two of her long-time friends
brought them to public attention.
Most of the poems we have were written in just six years, between
1858 and 1864. She bound them into small volumes she called
fascicles, and forty of these were found in her room at her death.
She also shared poems with friends in letters. From the few drafts of
letters that were not destroyed, at her instruction, when she died,
it's apparent that she worked on each letter as a piece of artwork in
itself, often picking phrases that she'd used years before. Sometimes
she changed little, sometimes she changed a lot.
It's hard to even tell for sure what "a poem" by Dickinson really "is,"
because she changed and edited and reworked so many, writing
them differently to different correspondents.
Emily Dickinson
Dickinson is noted for her use of special kinds of rhyme.
a. slant rhyme: a kind of consonance (relation between words in which
the final consonants in the stressed syllables agree but the vowels
that precede them differ: add/read, up/step, peer/pare,
while/hill).
b. eye rhyme: rhyme that appears correct from the spelling but is not
so from the pronunciation, such as watch/match, love/move,
through/enough.
c. true rhyme: identity of terminal sound between accented syllables,
usually occupying corresponding positions in two or more lines
of verse. The correspondence of sound is based on the vowels
and succeeding consonants of the accented syllables, which must,
for a true rhyme, be preceded by different consonants. Thus
"fan" and "ran" constitute a true rhyme because the vowel and
succeeding consonant sounds ("an") are the same but the
preceding consonant sounds are different.
Dickinson is noted for her use of special kinds of rhyme.
slant rhyme:
eye rhyme:
true rhyme:
After the last page of notes, write on sentence that begins with:
“It is important to study Whitman and Dickinson because…….
Emily Dickinson
and
Walt Whitman
Founders of a uniquely American Poetic voice.
“Tell the truth, but tell it slant.”
“I sound my barbaric yawp over
the roofs of the world.”