AMERICAN POETRY—WEEKLY NOTES
WEEK I: FROM (PRE-)COLOMBIAN TO COLONIAL
THE NAVAJO PEOPLE
Largest Native American group in the U.S., living in the Southwest (US and Mexico) as crafts-workers, farmers and cattle-raisers
Destroyed systematically in the 1850s-60s (“The Long Walk” of 1864: 8.000 Navajo forced to walk 483 km from Arizona to their prison in New Mexico)
“Dance of the Atsálei, or Thunderbirds”
Concluding ritual of the 9-day Night Chant or Nightwalk
Poetry chant as healing ritual
Poetic rhythm, repetition--} trance, rhythm of internal organs
Symbols:
Dark cloud of Male Divinity, rain
Dawn
Grasshoppers (spring, vitality)
4 thunderbirds (corn, child-rain, vegetation, pollen)
ANNE BRADSTREET (1612-1672)
1st American (woman) poet, 1st female writer to be published with The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America (1650)
She and her husband emigrated with John Winthrop’s group in American in 1630 (Massachusetts Bay Colony)
Educated; her father and husband were among the founders of Harvard; two of her sons graduates
Faced starvation, many difficult relocations, house fire, the death of her daughter-in-law and three grandchildren, smallpox paralysis, tuberculosis
Themes: personal, religious, on mortality, on women’s worth, on philosophical issues
“To My Dear and Loving Husband”
-Puritan appropriation of Elizabethan
sonnet convention:
woman woos man
model of feminine virtue, not sin
form/rhyme reflecting theme
typology: heavenly over earthly love, but latter leads to former (C/c Plato’s Symposium)
opposite of “carpe diem”; promise of immortality not through art
“In Memory of My Dear Grandchild, Elizabeth Bradstreet, Who Deceased August, 1665, Being a Year and a Half Old”
Poems for 3 grandchildren dead, house burned down
Apostrophe, eulogy, consolatio
Prefiguration of mourning as human fault:
“too much content”; “was lent”
Variation of 8+6 convention: 7+7—why?
-why rhyming scheme of same last 3 lines?
(Human sorrow, nature-based metaphors matched by super-natural God’s plan, which is given extra final emphasis)
PHILLIS WHEATLEY (1753-1784)
First African-American woman poet published (1773)
Brought as slave to America in 1761 (named after her slave ship); the Wheatleys classically educated her and nurtured her talent; success tour in the UK; liberated, but poverty, her husband’s imprisonment, deaths of all her 3 children and illness lead her to an early death.
Themes: elegies, classical, religious ideals and values, freedom
Problem of “Uncle Tomism” (alienated race consciousness) VS minority abolitionist rhetoric politics?\
“On Being Brought from Africa to America”
- Self-deprecating vocabulary
- Irony (Lord andSaviour; not seeking redemption because innocent, “Christians”, opinions of “some” in quotation marks)?
FROM REVOLUTION TO U.S. ROMANTICISM
War of Independence (1775-83) introduces themes of:
- American secular character (VS previous Colonialist Puritanism or adventurous spirit of discovery)
- Liberty, sovereignty, national glory (attempted epics, domestic poetic styles)
- Domestic problems: abolitionism, the Civil War (1861-65), the loss of “wild” America to urban capitalism
European Romanticism, with its turn to the medieval/exotic past and emphasis on wild, tremendous, hidden aspects of human soul, becomes:
- American Gothic (exploration of Darkness, often metaphysical)
- Transcendentalism (return to Nature)
PHILIP FRENEAU (1752-1832)
-Wealthy origins; West Indies, British capture experience sensitizes him towards anti-slavery, anti-British imperialism; journalist and “Poet of the American Revolution”; after savage political activity, died impoverished and unknown.
-Didacticism, philosophical spirit and sensuous verse
-Influence on later Romantic Primitivism, Gothic, and Transcendentalism
“The Indian Burying Ground”
18th-century “Graveyard Poetry” influence
Why a Native American graveyard?
Vocabulary for Natives
Is their mysticism appreciated?
Why is burial posture important?
“Activity that knows no rest” symbolic of?
c/c Keats’s “Ode to a Grecian Urn”
Past ghosts vs white visitor--> reciprocal cultural assimilation (final couplet)?
History as “trace” (Jacques Derrida)
EDGAR ALLAN POE
(1809-1849)
Abandoned orphan, adopted by Allan family; teen bride died of poverty; literary enemies (via criticism), alcoholism and illness led to late fame and early death.
Gothic Romanticism, Aestheticism
Definition of the short story
creation of detective story
Metaphysics, psychological horror, mystery
“Sonnet—To Science”
Attitude towards scientific fact, reality
Poetry as “shelter,” “dream”—from/of what
Mystery as necessary for poetry (Spenser, Shelley)
Is this poem “American”?
“To Helen”
Why this character? Symbol of?
Which one is the speaker’s “native shore”?
Why does she turn to “Psyche” with an “agate lamp”?
Can this “Holy-Land” be available to the speaker?
The Liebestod (love-in-death) motif
“The Raven”
Effect of alliteration, rhyme, long lines
Theme (and biographical analogy)
Symbols:
Midnight hour, December
Attic with purple curtains
bust of Pallas
the raven
Metaphysical elements: “Nevermore”
Psychoanalytic interpretation
WALT WHITMAN
(1819-1892)
Teen prodigy, autodidact, man of many trades (journalism, printing, Civil War volunteer nurse)
Democratic activist and abolitionist
Bohemian, unconventional, “rough”, openly gay (Live Oak, with Moss; Calamus)
Influences: transcendentalism, pantheism, romanticism, republicanism
1855 Leaves of Grass, American “epic,” revised and implemented until 1892 (“deathbed” edition)
Unrhymed, long lines; rhythmic repetition, grand, bold epic tone; key presence of nature; “father of free verse”
“Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking”
Romantic topos: childhood epiphany revisited by older poet-narrator
Symbols: cradle/ “savage old mother,” bird, boy, summer shore (Transcendentalist Trinity)
Why are there two formats (regular and italic print) for the poem’s stanzas?
Poet as seer, oionoscopos, “translator” of Nature
Why is the bird called a “demon”? What is the boy’s “curse”?
Why is “death” the sweetest word?
What is this poem about?
“Song of Myself” (1-13)
-What is “myself”?
-Transcendental elements
Relation to nature
Grass as a symbol
Attitude towards books
-Relation to other people (what kind?)
-Attitude towards problems of America
(racism, sexism, classism)
-How is this poem American?
-How is this poem an epic?
EMILY DICKINSON
(1830-1886)
-Spent all her life in Amherst, Massachussets (“Homestead”), except for one-year college stint at Mt. Holyoke Female Seminary in 1847
-Strict religious upbringing by protective, stern father; became a recluse, always dressed in white, refusing to meet people; intense relationships with friends, family-members, admired icons and possible lovers carried long-distance through prolific letter-writing and poem-gifts; presumed to have carried passionate sexual affairs with members of both sexes
-Voracious reader and learner, greatly influenced by Transcendentalism
-Her awareness of her great talent was thwarted by critics/editors, who did not understand her odd poetry (unusual use of dashes, iambic “slant”rhymes, meter taken from popular hymns, musicality, concentration, odd metaphors); many poems scribbled informally on scraps of papers, backs of envelopes, etc; many she burned due to disappointment, others she ordered burned after her death. Thankfully, her sister Lavinia did not comply all the way: surviving poems edited and published posthumously by Lavinia and neighbor Mabel Loomis Todd made Emily an instant and lasting success.
POEMS
49: “Irreverent” view of God/Father (possibly because of her own idea of fathers)
autobiographical reference to deaths of two loved relatives (father and 8 year-old nephew)
biblical motifs: the beggar Lazarus, Job, Jacob wrestling with the Angel
Format: dashes, stanza division re: tone, theme, vocabulary
185: Religion VS science as a more dependable faith
-Contrast between “faith” and “see”
-Double meaning of “fine invention”: irony, sarcasm
214: Drunkenness as a metaphor for happiness
-Transcendental elements (from nature to Heaven)
-Role of nature
-Seraphs, saints as symbols of?
249: Love affair as sailing
-Positioning: poet as ship, lover as calm “port”; port stanza “moored” in between sailing/rowing ones
-The gender of images: port, rowing, sea, “in” suggesting a female lover
-Alliteration, repetition, rhythm as joining metaphor to reality (sea waves, love rhythms)
280: Funeral as a metaphor for:
- A bad headache
- A confusing rumination on the mystery of death and the afterlife
- Emily’s attempt to deal with the alarming prospect of her headache-inducing eye illness
Last line: double meaning of “finished knowing” (knowledge ends, or journey ends in a special kind of transcendental knowledge)
324: Sabbath church as foil to transcendentalist home experience of theosis—experience of Emerson’s “Over-Soul” and “defiant pantheism”
Immediacy VS mediated contact with God
Individual human agency (Romantic) of choosing how to worship and constructing worship space out of imagination and will VS religious submission to fate, God, nature
712: Alternative view of Death as “kindly” gentleman, leisurely ride
Death related to immortality, eternity
Journey stages: childhood—maturity—old age—grave
Eternity as a matter of perspective, speaker hasn’t felt its passage
MODERNISM
trauma of wars (especially World Wars)
love of new--worship of machine (fascism); orientalism
classic culture VS fragmentation
exploration of the unconscious (automatic writing, surrealism, language experiments)
American expatriates (“The Lost Generation” Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell, T.S. Eliot) VS
Home poets:
The Prohibition (1920-33) and “The Roaring Twenties”
The Great Depression (1929-1939)
Socialism: poetry for the masses (minorities, the proletariat), symbolism, agrarian/regional themes
New York Dada (1915-1923)
Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935)
- Received great education, but plagued by delicate health, alcoholism, and bad luck: didn’t become famous until mid-life thanks to Kermit Roosevelt
- Prolifically and exclusively dedicated to poetry about losers (like he saw himself):
“The world is not a prison house, but a kind of spiritual kindergarten, where millions of bewildered infants are trying to spell God with the wrong blocks.”
- Won 3 Pulitzers and created “Tilbury Town” (modeled after Gardiner, Maine) for many of his characters.
- Although influenced by imagism, he followed old-fashioned forms with sensitivity and “democratic” outlook—see Frost’s praise that while “our age, ran wild in the quest of new ways to be new.... Robinson stayed content with the old-fashioned ways to be new.”
- Influence on Frost, later songwriters (“Elinor Rigby,” “Richard Cory”)
“Richard Cory”
-Name, archetypal image (blighted king/prince motif)
-Why do we have a list of his attributes?
-Diction division (pronouns)
-Final couplet—is it expected? Why? What does it mean?
Robert Frost (1874-1963)
- Regionalism (New England rural), symbolism, modernist themes and diction but traditional forms.
- Moved to England briefly to find fame, came back at 40 with it; read poet for JFK’s inauguration, enjoyed favored poet status and household-brand name, 4 Pulitzers.
- From epigrams (“Fire and Ice”) to long dramatic poems (“Death of a Hired Man”) with naturalist themes
- Poetry as “a momentary stay against confusion”
“Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening”
Pairs with “The Road Not Taken”
Rhyme and meter: like a children’s/holiday poem—why?
Symbols: woods, snow, horse, buggy and rider, season (irony of tradition)
Frost’s suicidal tendencies—poem as psychotherapy?
“After Apple Picking”
Symbols: various apple(s)
Winter season
Apple-picking activity
Ladder(axis mundi motif)
Final “sleep” as “woodchuck” or as man? What’s the difference?
MODERNISM AND ITS RHIZOMES
High (European) vs Low Modernism
-Imagism (Ezra Pound, HD, Amy Lowell), Vorticism, Dada
WALLACE STEVENS (1879-1955)
-Insurance company lawyer in Hartford, Connecticut
-Late call to vocation but lasting fame--> Pulitzer prize
-Fought with Frost and Hemingway
-Poetry an often playful oscillation between the mundane and the imaginative (in a secular way)
“Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”
- Orientalist, cubist and imagist influence
- Haiku-like form
- Perspectivism
- Why 13? Why blackbirds?
- “sense” of each vignette?
- The role of nature VS the role of the viewer
“Anecdote of the Jar”
- Imagist influence
- Importance of perception
- Axis mundi motif
- Why nonhuman perceiver? (“jar” slang for?)
WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS (1883-1963)
-Pediatrician (and philanderer…)
-“No ideas but in things” (simple, everyday American language and themes) VS movements, theories, YET experimental and fresh
-Member of NY’s “The Others” (with Stevens, Marianne Moore, Mina Loy, et al.) VS High Modernism
-Paterson, epic poem for Jersey town
-Great influence on the Beats and the Black Mountain School
“The Red Wheelbarrow”
- From image to inference of story
- Color and item contrast
“This Is Just to Say”
- Haiku influence
- Is this a poem? (form, language, images)
- What does the poem “just” say?
CARL SANDBURG (1878-1967)
- Started life on a series of working-class manual jobs; then Chicago journalist; finally, beloved author and poet-urban folk singer (guitar recitals); 3 Pulitzers
- Affinity for workers, African-Americans
“Grass”
Why personified?
Perspective important (from train; in time)
Lethe VS History
C/c Whitman’s Leaves of Grass
“Chicago”
Apostrophe (ode mode)
Tone, epithets selected
Why this focus on workers?
Why repetitious ending?
FROM THE ROARING 20IES TO THE POSTWAR YEARS
-From Prohibition (1920-33) to the Great Depression (1929-39) to McCarthyism and the Second Red Scare (1950-56):
America as a complex capitalist society with class and generation struggles
DOROTHY PARKER (1893-1967)
Poet, short story writer, critic and satirical poet for Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, Hollywood scriptwriter (acclaimed but blacklisted by McCarthyism), leftist activist, notorious wit
Early orphan trauma, troubled marriages, alcoholism
The only poet in Algonquin Round Table in NY
“Resumé”
Lifelong preoccupation with suicide in her art
Limerick form
Why this title?
Who is “you” she is talking to?
e.e. cummings (1894-1962)
-Poet, author, playwright, critic, painter, avant-garde innovator
-Harvard education, well-traveled, WWI experience makes him pacifist and Republican (defends small individual against state bureaucracy, mechanisms); modernist influence
“Buffalo Bill’s”
-Does BB seem “dead”?
-Formal innovation in:
punctuation
line placement
treatment (register)
—why “defunct”?
—why colloquial, irreverent tone?
-Meaning?
-Motif of the duel between Hero/Knight and Death
HILDA DOOLITTLE/ HD (1886-1961)
-“HD, Imagiste”
-Cosmopolitan, affluent, bisexual, well-travelled, active in Euromodernist movement and publishing
-Classicism, myth, the occult, and psychoanalysis
-Trilogy: The Walls do not Fall (1944), Tribute to the Angels (1945) and
The Flowering of the Rod (1946).
-Helen in Egypt (1955)
“Oread”
-imagist technique (Oriental economy and precision)
-meaning from contrast of images, elements, states
Sea/mountain; Waves/pines; (E)Motion-->meaning?
-C/c with Percy B. Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind”
EZRA POUND (1885-1972)
-Poetical youth prodigy, “Make it new”
Initiator, nurturer and guide of top modernist movements/poets
-Volatile personality, fascist lapse and harsh imprisonment in 1945, followed by 12 years in mental hospital
--> The Pisan Cantos (1948)
-Controversial legacy
“A Pact”
-Form
-Why VS Whitman?
-Art and/as politics?
-The role of tradition (family metaphor)
“Let there be commerce” VS “usury”
“In a Station of the Metro”
-Imagism, orientalist influence
-suggested emotion from language choice/contrast/metaphor?
T(HOMAS) S(TEARNS) ELIOT (1888-1965)
“Poetry is...an escape from emotion”—here’s why:
- Childhood health problems (“premature decrepitude”), literary direction a “betrayal” of active male family tradition
-Exceptional studies (classical letters and languages—Greek, Latin, Sanskrit; philosophy; French); taught himself Italian to read Dante
-Early turn to literature and college teaching--> Faber and Faber publishing director
- Severe health problems aggravated by heavy smoking and alcohol abuse
- Religious and cultural dissatisfaction:
Unitarian American expatriate--> High Anglican Briton
Modernity VS Dante’s age
- Unsuccessful marriage to socialite Vivienne Haigh-Wood (possible homosexuality)
“To her, the marriage brought no happiness. To me, it brought the state of mind out of which came The Waste Land."
-Eventual contentment at 68 with 2nd marriage to his secretary, Valerie Fletcher
- Poetry elusiveness:
“So here I am, ... having had twenty years—
Twenty years largely wasted...
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure....
...And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
(East Coker, 172-180).
-Fragmentation and allusion (“the mythical method”)
-Meeting with Ezra Pound gets “Prufrock” and The Waste Land published (and shaped WL to about half-size and more powerful)
-Small poetical production (also plays, essays), but gems of craftsmanship and art
-1948 Nobel Prize in Literature
The Waste Land as Heroic Quest Cycle (monomyth):
- Part I: The Call to Adventure—Identifying the problem
- Part II-III: Adventure—Descend to Hell/London
- Part IV: The Belly of the Beast—Death as transformation
- Part V: The Ultimate Boon (putting the fragments together) VS the Apocalypse
LATE MODERNISM/ANIMAL SYMBOLISM
MARIANNE MOORE (1887-1972)
Teacher, editor of The Dial, mentor to many poets, well-respected by peers and public (Bollingen, Pulitzer, etc)
“To a Snail”
-Frequent appearance of animals in her poetry
-“metaphysical conceit”: use of unlikely poetic subject as symbol
-main grace of snail: “compression” (also prized in MM’s poetry); horn instead of “feet”