Walt Whitman & Emily Dickinson Performer - Culture & Literature Marina Spiazzi, Marina Tavella,...

Walt Whitman & Emily DickinsonPerformer - Culture & Literature

Marina Spiazzi, Marina Tavella,Margaret Layton © 2012

Winslow Homer, The Fog Warning, 1885, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, US.

Walt Whitman & Emily Dickinson

1. Walt Whitman: life

Walt Whitman

• He was born in New York into a working-class family in 1819.

• He had little formal education.

• At eleven he started to work as an office boy and then became a printer’s apprentice for a local newspaper.

• He became a journalist supporting radical democratic causes.

Performer - Culture & Literature


Walt Whitman

• He travelled widely through his country.

• He acquired a self-taught cultureincluding the Bible, Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Carlyle,Goethe, Hegel, Emerson, oriental religion and philosophy.

• In 1855 he published the first edition of Leaves of Grass.

• Nine editions followed, each containing new poems.




1. Walt Whitman: life• The third one, in 1860,

aroused the indignation of puritanical readers and gained Whitman a reputation for obscenity and homosexuality.

• During the Civil War he visited wounded soldiers in the army hospitals.

• He continued to believe in the value of democracy and technological progress.




• The fourth edition of Leaves of Grass (1867) contained poems on the Civil War and on the death of President Lincoln.

• In 1873 he retired to Camden, New Jersey, where he was visited by admirers and disciples.

• He died in 1892.



2. Walt Whitman: his influence

• Whitman’s popularity in Europe grew in the 1870s, especially appreciated by the Aesthetic Movement.

• He influenced later poets such as Ezra Pound, Carl Sandburg, and, more recently, the Beat Generation.

• He is generally regarded as the father of American poetry, as the first voice that was distinctly new and ‘American’.



3. Leaves of Grass (1855)

Walt Whitman

• Published on 4th July American Independence Day

• Included a preface where the author introduced the subject matter, the language and the aim of his poetry.

• Not a collection of poems but a life-long poem.



3. Leaves of Grass (1855)

• A total of nine different editions published between 1855 and 1892.

• Implied a process of developmentand expansion resulting from a transcendental sense of the unityof all things.

• All of life and experience, reality itself, were a process, a continuing,all-embracing flow.



4. Themes of Whitman’s poetry

• Optimism and romantic faith in the dynamic futureof the American nation.

• Democracy and the ‘American dream’.

• The self-celebration of the poet as a prophet of his country.

• The dignity of the individual, conceived as the unity of body and soul.



5. Song of Myself

• Myself Whitman’s poetic personality

• Me self Whitman’s inner personality

• My soul An enigma, unexpected otherness


In Song of Myself Whitman divided his being into three.


5. Song of Myself


Song of Myself celebrates the meeting between

• The ‘I’ Whose reality is constantly questioned

• The ‘you’ The ‘other’, ‘whoever you are’


6. Whitman’s style• Use of free verse.

• Long lines where rhythm is determined by the thought or emotion expressed.

• Use of accumulation and addition.

• The participle often replaces the finite verb.

• Use of dialect and common speech.

• Few similes and metaphors.



7. Emily Dickinson: life

• She was born into a middle-class Puritan family in Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1830.

• Her father, a lawyer and a politician, influenced her emotional development and religious belief.

• She received her university education at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary.


Emily Dickinson


7. Emily Dickinson: life• She refused to declare her faith in

public, as required by the Puritan tradition.

• She interrupted her studies and returned home.

• She began a life of seclusion and only wore white clothes as ambiguous emblems of spiritual marriage and singleness.

• She never left her father’s house except for some walks in the garden.


Emily Dickinson


• She died in 1886.

• Poems by Emily Dickinson appeared in 1890 published by the literary critic Thomas W. Higginson.

• A complete edition of her poems appeared in 1955, edited by Thomas Johnson.

• A collection of her letters was published in 1958.


7. Emily Dickinson: life


8. Influences on Dickinson

• The Bible, Shakespeare, Milton, the Metaphysical poets.

• Contemporary writers like Emily Brontë.

• The Puritan tradition.

• Emerson’s Transcendentalism.


The Homestead, East Facade



9. Dickinson vs. Whitman

Emily Dickinson

• The poet of what is broken and absent.

• Detached from contemporary taste, from the great events and contrasts of the age.

• Poetry of isolation.• Used her poetry to

challenge received certainties.

Walt Whitman

• The poet of wholeness.• Deeply interested and

involved in the issues of his time.

• Poetry of celebration.• His task was to respond to

the spirit of his country, to give voice to the common man.


10. Themes in Dickinson’s poetry

• Death and loss.• Love and desire.• Time.• Fear, sorrow and despair.• God.• Nature.• Man’s relation to the

universe.



11. The theme of death

Death from the point of view of:

•the person dying;•a witness.

Death the great mystery, connected with eternity, a liberation from anxiety.

Death the place where the human being tends to, in order to become one with the universe.



12. The theme of love

Love is explored through a full range of emotions:

•from ecstatic and sensual celebration

•to the despair due to separation.

•Love expectation of eternity as the hope of a final spiritual union.



13. The theme of nature

Different from man: a source of wonder or fear.

Can be presented:

•through an objective description;

•by juxtaposing the thing observed and the soul of the observer the natural datum leads to philosophical speculation;

•as a source of imagery to emphasise an abstract concept or theme.



14. Dickinson’s style• Poems do not have a title.

• Short poems, organised in simple quatrains.

• Use of monosyllabic words.

• Terms from various sources:law, geometry, engineering.

• Use of rhetorical devices such asimperfect rhymes, assonance, alliteration, paradox, metaphor, ellipsis and capitalisation.

• Extensive use of dashes.


Walt Whitman & Emily Dickinson Performer - Culture & Literature Marina Spiazzi, Marina Tavella,...

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