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Hi, I'm Karen Ford from the University of Oregon Department of English, and

this lecture will be on Whitman and Dickinson as precursors of modern poetry.

Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, a strange uncoupled couple.

Why would a course in modern and contemporary American poetry include two

19th Century poets, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson?

True, they are widely considered to be the two greatest American

poets before the 20th Century, and they continue to exert a strong

influence over contemporary poets in the US and around the world.

But they are also crucial to Modern and

Contemporary Poetry because they each, in their different and similar ways,

made American poetry distinctly American, and therefore, made it new.

Decades before make it new became the watch word of 20th

century American poetry.

Many argue that the birth cry of this new American poetry was Whitman's legendary,

Barbaric Yawp, sounded over the roofs of the world, as he put it,

near the end of his revolutionary poem, Song of Myself, in 1855.

To understand why Whitman's and Dickinson's poems sounded to many of their

contemporary readers like Barbaric Yawps, it helps to

hear the poetry their contemporaries read beneath the roofs of that world.

Poets in the United States were as numerous and

prolific in 1837 when Ralph Waldo Emerson put out a call for

a genuinely American literature as they are today.

But in his American Scholar Address,

Emerson challenged them to be more American.

Proclaiming, we have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe, and

urged writers to create a literature distinctive to the New World, and

the still new country.

He said, our day of dependence,

our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close.

The millions that around us are rushing into life cannot always be fed

on the sere remains of foreign harvests.

Poet Oliver Wendell Holmes' father called Emerson's American Scholar lecture

America's intellectual declaration of Independence.

But ten years later, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, another influential mind,

was still chewing on those sere remains that Emerson had warned against.

Insisting that American letters must develop from the rest of the world's

literature about which he was singularly knowledgeable for his time.

Including the familiar literature of England.

His short novel, Cavanaugh, a book Dickinson hid in her piano bench, so

her father wouldn't know she was reading a popular novel, dramatizes a lively and

urgent debate about the character of American literature.

In it, an editor, Mr. Hathaway, wants to found a journal devoted to

his vision of precisely the new national poetry Whitman would shortly inaugurate.

We want a national epic that shall correspond to the size of the country.

We want national drama in which scope enough shall be given to our gigantic

ideas and to the unparalleled activity and progress of our people.

In a word, we want a national literature altogether shaggy and unshorn,

that shall shake the earth like a herd of buffaloes thundering over the prairies.

A schoolteacher, Mr. Churchill, in contrast holds that literature is rather

an image of the spiritual world than of the physical, and

rejects the association of literary production with location.

All of what is best in the great poets of all countries is not what is national in

them, but what is universal.

Their roots are in their native soil, but their branches wave in the unpatriotic

air, that speaks the same language unto all men,

and their leaves shine with the illimitable light that pervades all lands.

In defiance of Emerson's appeal for an American literature, liberated from its

long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, Churchill believes that we

are very like the English, are in fact English under a different sky, and

does not see how our literature can be very different from theirs.

Much of the poetry written in the United States in the 19th century

confirmed Churchill's assertion that we are very like the English.

One of the most popular and influential poets of the day, and ironically also one

of the most widely read and innovative, was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

Longfellow's poetry was extraordinarily diverse in both form and subject matter

and his work cannot be reduced to a single poem or even a single type of poem.

But it is fair to say that his Hymn To Night is one among many of the poems that

captures the popular literary taste in New England, before Whitman and

Dickinson tuned readers ears to new sounds.

I heard the trailing garments of the Night.

Sweep through her marble halls!

I saw her sable skirts all fringed with light.

From the celestial walls!

I felt her presence, by its spell of might.

Stoop o'er me from above.

The calm, majestic presence of the Night,.

As of the one I love.

I heard the sounds of sorrow and delight.

The manifold, soft chimes.

That fill the haunted chambers of the Night.

Like some old poet's rhymes.

In soothing quatrains of exact rhymes, night light, halls,

walls, and regular rhythmic shorter and longer lines,

you can hear the alliteration of the five and three beats per line.

I felt her presence, by its spell of might.

Stoop oér me from above.

The calm, majestic presence of the Night.

As of the one I love.

In soothing stanzas, Longfellow speaker pictures a nightfall as a woman in

dark robes who sweeps through his world with a calm, heavenly presence that

puts him at ease and reminds him comfortably of some old poet's rhymes.

The kind of old poet whose rhymes he's thinking of is a poet who writes just

like he does, in a traditional stanza form and meter with conventional

figurative language, all in support of conventional sentiment.

Oh holy night from thee I learned to bear, what man has borne before.

The poem urges that a night of untroubled rest will help us endure the troubles of

our daily lives.

It calls for acceptance of the usual, the cares that man has borne before, and

it makes that call in a poetic form that likewise suggests

acceptance of the usual kind of poetry.

After all, the night reminds him of some old poets' rhymes.

It is a hymn and its traditional hymn stanza form, poeticisms like or,

for over, and apostrophe to a personified night, oh holy night.

A phrase that would become the title of a real hymn just a few years later

contribute to its conventional purposes.

It is a poem that in every way wants to offer comfort to readers

who endure life's cares without the expectation that anything will change.

Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, in contrast,

expected poetry to be able to change the world.

If today we believe that the literature of the United States is

very different from theirs, that is, different from England's, that on or

about July 1855, the character of American poetry changed.

Then the Poetic Revolution heralded by Whitman in the midst of the crowd, and

by Dickinson in the freedom of her second story Corner Bedroom originated in many

important respects with the poetry they began writing in the mid 19th century.

A poetry that sounded strange to their readers.

Here's Whitman's One's-Self I Sing.

A poem he wrote in the 1860's that eventually became one of the inscriptions

to the final version of his life's work, the volume Leaves of Grass.

It eventually opens Leaves of Grass because it introduces his idea

of what a poet should do for his country.

>> One-Self I Sing, by Walt Whitman.

One self I sing, a simple separate person.

Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse.

Of physiology from top to toe I sing.

Not physiognomy alone nor brain alone is worthy for the.

Muse, I say the Form complete is worthier far,

The Female equally with the Male I sing.

Of Life immense in passion, pulse, and power.

Cheerful, for freest action form'd under the laws divine.

The Modern Man I sing.

>> And here is a poem Dickinson wrote just a few years earlier,

in which she describes a quite different role for the American poet.

>> The Soul selects her own Society.

Then shuts the Door >> To her,

divine majority, present no more.

Unmoved, she notes the Chariots, pausing.

At her low gate.

Unmoved, an Emperor be kneeling.

Upon her Mat.

I've known her from an ample nation.

Choose One.

Then close the valves of her attention.

Like Stone.

>> Whitman's One's-Self I Sing is unlike Longfellow's Hymn to the Night

in almost every respect despite the fact that both poems announce themselves as

songs in their titles.

But Longfellow's song, as the word hymn suggests and

as we've just seen is conventional and conservative in form and argument.

Whitman's song is no hymn, he says he's singing himself, One's-Self I Sing,

an unusual locution that occurs all at once to what he is singing about,

of physiology from top to toe, I sing, of life immense in passion,

pulse, and power, whom he's singing to, to himself and

to the modern man, and also refers to the act of singing itself.

His poems, he declares, are not just about and to, they are the singing of the self,

a self imagined simultaneously as a simple separate person and as a modern man.

What we hear in Leaves of Grass is this new American self, a single person and

all people, celebrating his individuality and his unity with others.

A unity that begins with the poet's embrace of ostensible polarities

like body and mind, male and female, personal freedom and

divine law and ultimately, of himself and all others.

The form for his embrace of life is rhythmic free verse and thus he does not

marshall his ideas into rhyme, meter and stanzas as Longfellow does.

His free verse is free in both its formal structure and in its thinking.

It says the country's poets must embrace paradox Must be passionate and

ebullient, and must speak for himself and for all his countrymen.

Dickinson's poem might seem to bear no relation to Whitman's except perhaps,

in also being utterly different from Longfellow's.

For her speaker, the self is not democratic and does not speak en-masse.

The language of this poem,

in fact, turns adamantly away from the democratic masses to describe a superior,

removed monarch who refuses rather than embraces her society.

This soul selects her own society and is a divine majority of one.

Far beneath her at her low gate, antiquated chariots stop and

emperors kneel at her doorstep, entreating an audience with her.

But this superior self chooses just one from the whole nation,

possibly one other select self, but more likely just herself, and

then turns her attention away from everyone else.

Unlike Longfellow's acquiescent speaker who accepts the difficulties of his life,

Dickinson's speaker announces that she will refuse anything and

anyone she prefers not to select.

And even though Dickinson's The Soul Selects Her Own Society employs

the conventional hymn stanza, it does so in a number of unconventional ways.

Here the ABAB rhyme schemes are mostly dissonant off rhymes, pausing,

kneeling, gate, mat, nation, attention, one, stone.

And though her lines, like long fellows, alternate between longer, four beats,

and shorter two beats, these letters are so short, as to halt the rhythmic

movement that alternating long and short lines offered to Longfellow stanzas.

Unmoved she notes the Chariots pausing.

At her low Gate.

Unmoved an Emperor be kneeling.

Upon her Mat.

In fact, by the final stanza, the shorter lines have contracted to a single beat

emphasizing the speaker's insistence on choosing one.

Listen for

the contraction of sound as the speaker closes the valves of her attention.

I've known her from an ample nation.

Chose One.

Then close the Valves of her attention.

Like stone.

Again, though Dickerson's speaker in this poem would not be caught dead uttering

the word democratic, the word en-masse like Whitman's, and though her rhymed and

metered hymn stanzas sonically curtail the kind of freedom Whitman associates with

free verse, the two speakers share an almost megalomaniac sense of personal

authority and individual rights, and they write poems that ratify those rights.

Absent in both Whitman and Dickinson is Longfellow's submission to the status quo.

Both life's status quo,

and poetry's.

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Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson: 'A Strange, Uncoupled Couple' (Part 1)

Modern American Poetry

Meet the Instructors