Beginning of modern American poetry

WALT WHITMAN (1819 - 1892)

He had to work since he was 11 years old in Brooklyn, although it was not legal to employ children. He observed people and had also time to read good old classics like Homer, Dante and Shakespeare. Whitman came from weird family, oldest brother died in insane asylum on syphilis, sister married an alcoholic, younger brother married prostitute and died of over-dose of alcohol and tuberculosis, other brother was mentally and physically handicapped, only two brothers were successful engineers.

Whitman could not live from his poetry; he worked as journalist and was an active soldier during the Civil War. He was tall, masculine, good looking and exercised since he believed the poet should look good and combine spiritual and physical beauty. He used common everyday language, no difficult symbols, metaphors or allusions to Bible. Whitman poetry should be read aloud; even if it does not rhyme it has rhythm. He was influenced by Emerson's essay The Poet.

He is the poet Emerson called for in chapter one of his Nature where the poet is the seer of the world as whole as transparent eye-ball who forgets himself and writes about everything for everyone. However, in America nobody really read him, only Europeans but his poems were popular only because they were banned which is the best advertisement. He was also transcendentalist. Calamus Poems were shocking for their openly homosexuality.

When in 1875 Leaves of Grass were published, he was more criticized then actually read because of his obscenity and pornography. Only Emerson said it was not so bad and send him letter that he likes Whitman writes about nature but should be more decent. Whitman took part of the letter and used it in next collection to say that Emerson approved which made Emerson angry. He kept revising this collection all his life and was adding poems to it. With this collection, he invented the myth of democratic America.

He is considered to be a father of free verse instead of conventional metre and end rhymes. Poems were very subjective, uses a lot of “I” which was not common before, in addition the author of the poem is the author himself which does not happens often in the poetry. He uses a lot of repetition, also considered partly romantic when dealing with nature and puts emphasize on individuality. He took from Emerson that anything can become a poem, therefore concentrating on little objects like leaves of grass. For him all America was a poem he was trying to write, he wrote about everything he saw ale felt, even non-poetic things and taboo subjects.

Poetic sequence is the form used in Leaves of Grass = poems are linked by one idea, although they are lyrical, connected by its tone = he is the poet of the body and the soul since he linked soul and nature like Emerson and what happens in Nature reflects in your Soul but he went farer that Emerson and even hugged trees naked.

I Hear America Singing is a poem celebrating every individual (mentioning various professions and both genders) who makes America great and the right of every single person for liberty that makes democracy and greatness of America possible. Later in 1920s, Langston Hughes of the Harlem Renaissance wrote his own version I, Too, Sing America in which he included Afro-Americans who are also a part of American nation.

Song of Myself is his second most famous collection, a poetic sequence with numbered poems. The first poem encourages the readers to have self-confidence ("I celebrate myself") and maybe the second word of the title "myself" does to refer to the speaker but to all readers, even though not everybody has to share his opinion ("what I assume you shall assume"). He again refers to the "summer grass" that grows everywhere which is very democratic and tries to create a sense of American history ("from this soil") but he might be lying a bit, everybody was just an immigrant at that time. The narrator lives in the present moment and considers himself perfect as he is right now ("thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin"). He stays open-minded even though somebody else might dislike him ("to speak at every hazard") and he just says whatever comes from nature ("Nature without check").

The third poem of the collection complains that other people only talk about past and future ("talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end") but the narrator claims that what passed is not important ("I do not talk of the beginning or the end") and what comes just comes. He dwells in the present moment ("there was never any more inception than there is now") and everybody is perfect as they are right now ("will never be any more perfection than there is now"). The identifies the urge to have sex and procreate as universal principle ("procreant urge of the world...always sex...always a breed of life"). He even refers to the mesmerism ("electrical"), a notion very popular at his time, and claims that all phenomena are linked by a magnetic field. He finds that everything is perfect, outside and inside ("clear and sweet is my soul and clear and sweet is all that is not my soul"). Everything is linked ("lack one lacks both"), to divide something destroys unity ("showing the best and dividing it from the worst age vexes age") and the narrators accepts everything about him ("welcome is every organ and attribute of me"), he is totally satisfied.

The eleventh poem is erotic (not pornographic, it is not that explicit). It depicts "young man bathe by the shore" and twenty-eight years old woman watching them from the window. She is lonely and it was a disaster not to have husband at her age. She fantasises about joining them and she would gladly take any of them as "the homeliest of them is beautiful to her." In her imagination, she touches them erotically, down to their...what poet leaves to everybody's imagination ("unseen hand pass'd over their bodies, it descended..."). The men have no idea "who seizes fast to them" in her fantasy, "they do not think whom they souse with spray."

The twenty-first poem is fulfilment of Emerson's vision as the narrator is not rejecting anything ("pleasures of heaven are with me and the pains of hell are with me") and claims "I am the poet of the Body and I am the poet of the Soul." He proclaims men and women different but in a positive way ("it is great to be a woman as to be a man") and he makes a remark that celebrates women: "there is nothing greater than the mother of men." Whitman does not believe in predetermination, it does not matter where you start, you may succeed as your position is not important (after all, even President's position has a limited time span) but what you are is important. Soul reflects in Nature and the beauty is in your eyes, you choose what is beautiful to you.

EMILY ELIZABETH DICKINSON (1830 – 1886)

She was dressing in white all the time and the only friends she had were correspondence friends (her only love was in letters with some editor). She never married, lived in her father´s house and spent time reading mainly Emerson, Wordsworth, Charlotte Brontë and Shakespeare. She went to school but returned after a year since she could not stand to be with so many people. She was not religious but admired Old Testament since her family was still very Puritanical. She did not even know who wrote around her, only was aware of Whitman but did not read him because she heard he was disgusting.

Only seven poems were published during her lifetime and they were not meant to be published so she did not observe poetic norms of that time. She only reminded of conceit of John Donne, though, did not know him but she put two opposite ideas together. She wrote 800 poems (without titles – she did not want to limit readers´ imagination) and sewed poems together manually. However, when poems were published, publishers destroyed punctuations, dashes and an order. In 1924 the most representative poems were published and in 1955 all poems plus letter and diary entries were published in the original form.

She was aware of limitations of the world she lived in (garden, house, her room) but she managed to describe limitations of experience and understanding. She´s describing little animals and insects but in the poems they seem much bigger as if seen though magnifying glass. She noticed that the process of thinking is no ordered so she preferred one concrete image expressed in the most economic shortest way possible by using verse that is not necessarily musical or regular. Thanks to his, she influenced Imagism of Ezra Pound.

As a poet, she was very different from other poets and like Whitman who was describing everything he saw - she was mainly describing inner landscape. Most poems have no regular rhythm and the best poems are the shortest ones with dashes that are creating more meanings with 2-3 possibilities and by using punctuations she connects ideas normally incompatible when trying to find original form best for her thoughts.

Because of her limited experience she had also limited topics – mainly death often connected with love as she tried to describe how it feels (later by Virginia Woolf and James Joyce). Poems have open endings with no outcome. She is changing rhythm all the time, omitting rhymes, often using eye rhymes (two words seem they would rhyme but when pronounced they do not), half rhymes and paratactic syntax (all clauses are on the same level, no more important clauses).

Her poems connected to death are about impossibility going beyond certain level in that kind of topic. She also wrote poems about nature using romantic themes but in different way - observations of the garden and compares what she sees there with what happens in her mind. She is maybe more naturalistic then romantic (cute bird kills worm). In philosophical psychological poems she is trying to come to terms with rules of society.

This Is My Letter to the World presents a "letter" in the form of a poem. Dickinson is complaining that the world never responded to her poetry as it often happens to poets. She claims that she just writes what Nature tells her (using the word with capital N, influenced by Emerson) and she wants to pass to the readers ("to hands I cannot see"). She begs the readers not to be too hard on her poetry.

Because I Could Not Stop for Death is a bit ironical. Death is presented as a friendly gentleman that "kindly stopped" for her because she could not decide the time of her own death (except for a suicide). She recollects three stages of life: childhood, maturity and old age. For death, she wears only light cloth so she feels chilly, it is the chill of the grave. The carriage of death stops before a freshly made grave and she realises that eternity awaits her in death.

Hope Is the Things with Feathers is his rare optimistic poem. She states that hope never dies and it is not a matter of words, hope is in one's soul. Something awful can drive hope away when people are in a bad situations and lost, yet hope never asks anything for return, it is always with you.

I Heard Fly Buzz When I Died is a retrospective in the 1st person narrative of a speaker who already died. The narrator is dead but still speaks and describes the stillness of death with no movement, no sound, stopped breathing, no more tears. The speaker is mentally preparing for death when she is annoyed but a Fly buzzing around her. She depicts the sound as blue which combines the visual and sound sensation to express sadness. Her eyes are wide open but she cannot see ("then the windows failed and then I could not see to see"). The Fly is marked with capital F to make it seem bigger. The room is in total silence, that is why the Fly's buzz is especially annoying.

EDGAR ALLAN POE (1809 – 1849)

He was born in Boston into the theatre family who were giving him a pacified with gin during plays so that he would not cry but had mental issues from early age because of it. Parents died soon so he was adopted by Mr Allan and moved to the south. Poe wanted to become a professional writer but sadly enough, he lived in the age without copyright law. Poe was more appreciated in Europe. After his death he was fortotten in America but celebrated in Europe and he became the first American writer who influenced European literature, especially French symbolic poets French like Baudelaire. Although he deals with dark topics, Poe is still considered a romantic author.

Poe was influenced by poetic theory of Samuel Coleridge for whom poem was a rhythmical creation of beauty = poem should bring happiness and enjoyment without teaching anything - you can look for anything but the truth in poetry. Poe totally accepted it and believed poetry should not bring knowledge of the world, nor moral message. Just the opposite: to make real world seem unreal, take reader into imagination and never come back - even destroy mind. Meaning is not in words only but in combination of sound and rhythm that create more meaning than words. The only task of poem is to be beautiful. The Poe is founder of modern American poetry.

Poe was not accepted well by American readers when a narrative poem The Raven came out in 1845. Everybody was sceptical, nobody wanted to publish him arguing he is too dark, depressive and weird. To defence, Poet wrote an essay Philosophy of Composition where he is explaining The Raven word by word. However, this was just his hoax - he is only pretending to take is seriously.

Other poems: Lenore, The Haunted Palace, The Bells. A Dream within a Dream is a speculative poem, the narrator himself is confused, firstly he claimed that "all that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream" but at the last two lines he is not entirely sure.

The Raven is set during dark and cold December. The narrator is falling asleep while reading an occult book to look for the way to revive his beloved Lenore, either a wife or a lover. The atmosphere is scary or the narrator is just imagining things, influenced by the book he is reading. He hears a noise but he is too scared to open the door, what if the book worked and the ghost of Lenore awaits there? He calls for Lenore and the tapping noise answers. A huge raven flies into the room and sits on the bust of Athena. The narrator things that the raven comes from the other side, afterlife. Is the raven a massager from Lenore? He asks for the raven's name but the only answer from the bird is "nevermore." What does it mean? The narrator asks if he will ever feel better but again the answer is "nevermore," then whether he will be reunited with Lenore but again "nevermore." He tells the raven to leave him in his sorrow. The raven is either a magical bird, a real bird that just wandered in and it seems as if it can speak one word or everything is just in the narrator's head, his wild imagination.

The Fire Side Poets can also be considered as modern American poets -> Romanticism.