Eng Final Exam

Walt Whitman (1819-1892):

Brief Description:

Romantic + Transcendentalist

Liked to push boundaries

“America’s first poet” and the embodiment of a bold new Democratic country.

Humanist

Themes:

  • The individual & the “everyman” - Celebrated himself as a unique individual but also celebrated the “oneness” of the group.

  • Democracy - Democratic in both subject matter and language; capturing the new country growing around him.

  • Body & Soul - The body is the vessel that allows the soul to experience the world; the body should be celebrated.

  • Cycle of life - All is born and reborn; we all return from where we came.

Poems:

Song of Myself:

I. I celebrate myself, and sing myself,

  • Man and nature

  • He celebrates himself and everyone else is worthy to be celebrated.

  • He wants to keep the celebration until death. *3rd stanza

  • Everyone is equal *“For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”

  • Everyone should be themselves.

XXXIII. I understand the large hearts of heroes:

  • He knows what it means to be a hero.

  • First-person POV

  • Deeds of forgotten heroes.

  • Empathizes + becomes the heroes.

  • Tense and dark attitude.

    1. Sailor: Saved people from a shipwreck with the personification of “Death” following him.

    2. Mother: Burnt in front of her children for being a “witch.”

    3. Hounded slave:

    4. Mashed fireman

    5. Old artillerist

  • Free verse

  • Uses of imagery and empathetic tone.

  • Examples of alliteration:

  1. Heart of heroes

  2. Skipper saw

  3. Distant and dead

  4. Lank loose-gown’d women look’d

  5. Head with whip-stocks

  6. Breast-bone broken

  7. Cries, curses

  8. Rent roof

  • Imagery: Whitman uses imagery to become the heroes. An example is when he used visual imagery for the cinematic flashback of the sailor at the beginning and he also used tactile and visual imagery to paint the image of the “hounded slave.”

  • With repetition and parallel structure, he creates internal rhyming.

  • Tone: Empathetic and emotive

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886):

Brief description:

New England

Religious family

Fell in love with married men.

The second man became her muse.

Dressed in white representing the bride she would never become.

Wrote only for herself.

America’s or the world’s greatest poet.

Capital letters (For important or symbolic things) and dashes (pause).

Themes:

  • Power of Nature - The beauty & perfect balance in nature is evidence of God’s existence.

  • Death - Seen as a doorway to truth, the beginning of a new journey.

  • Truth/madness - A matter of perspective; the majority doesn’t necessarily determine truth.

  • “Alone Time” - Value placed on a solitary life in which only a few close relationships are allowed.

Poems:

Because I Could Not Stop For Death

  • Use of capitalization and dashes.

  • Personification: Give human characteristics to a non-human. Death in this case.

  • Death is a male, a gentleman, since he is well-mannered.

  • Death came for her and she did not stop for him.

  • The “-” acts as a freefall to the next line, strongly linking these verses, as she does throughout, we can predict.

  • The poetic voice needs to start letting go of things that are not necessary.

  • Explains her journey throughout life.

  • Thinks about her life growing up while her life is ending.

  • Gossamer, tippet, only tulle very thin pieces of clothing - her clothes suddenly feel very thin.

  • When the sun goes down, the temperature goes down, the body cools down.

  • The “house” is the gravestone.

  • In the end, the speaker has already moved on. Anything before were things that already happened before her death.

  • Time depends on how you perceive it.

  • Themes: Acceptance, loss, memories.

  • Tone/mood: Calm, passive, contemplative, serene, content, acceptive.

  • Speaker’s attitude towards death: Calm and accepting towards it. She is in no rush and has stopped being interested in both her work and personal life.

  • By personifying death in that way, she achieves to describes him in a gentle, nontraditional way it is normally described.

  • Dickinson may be emphasizing the idea that death is an impartial force that comes for everyone, regardless of their personal identity, by personifying death and giving it more attention.

  • The words that Dickinson personifies are capitalized too.

Much Madness if divinest Sense:

  • Madness and sense are the same thing.

  • A non-conformist is seen as “mad” and a conformist is seen as sensical.

  • She argues that some things considered mad are sane, and things considered sane are mad.

  • People need to think independently.

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849):

Romanticism era

Poems:

The Raven:

  • Lyric poem with sort of a pattern.

  • The raven represents the inability to reunite with someone.

  • Lenore, a person the speaker lost, is described as an ethereal figure.

  • Repetition of “Nevermore,” something that reminds the speaker that he will never be with Lenore again.

  • Starts panicking as he starts asking more questions.

  • Alliteration, rhyme, repetition, and meter come together to catch the reader up in the wild, frantic feeling of the poem.

  • First, he was reading in a weak and weary state then was interrupted by a tap.

  • He tries to convince himself.

  • More than a man in a room, it is a man inside his own mind.

  • The speaker is grasping for rational explanations while his burning soul perceives a threat.

  • The speaker thinks the Raven learned only one rote response from a previous depressed master.