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LITR 4328: American Renaissance  |
Final Exam Essays 2015 Sample answers
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Sarah Hurt
Lyrical Poetry with Poe, Whitman, and Dickinson
When people think of poetry, they are most commonly thinking of lyric
poetry. Lyric poems often work as songs and originally were sung by bards (epic
poetry such as the Iliad, or the
Odyssey were preformed this way),
“even lyrics printed on a page and read in silence retain musical, tonal, or
sensory qualities like rhyme, rhythm, alliteration, assonance, elevated or
exotic diction or word choice, even melody” (course site page: Lyric). Lyric
poetry can express ideas that can be hard to explain; this style of poetry is
useful for condensing ideas that might take large amounts of prose to explain
and turning the idea the poet is trying to express into a smaller condensed form
of literature. Lyric poetry appeals to the reader because of its sound, the
images it can bring up, the way that lyric poems “often represent and appeal to
a moment” (Course site page: Lyric) and the intense way that ideas are expressed
due to the condensed nature of poems.
When it comes to the three poets, Poe is the most formal and the most
lyrical in his style. Every time I read a poem by Poe I always imagine it being
sung because of his use of rhythm and rhyme. “The City in the Sea” is
characteristic of Poe in that the poem is formal with most lines rhyming. I was
surprised with lines 1.3-1.5 as three lines rhymed rather than couplets. Poe,
for the most part sticks to a formal style, however, within this poem it seems
strange as if he could not fix the lines in the way he wanted. Poe is known for
his use of gothic elements, and “The City in the Sea” is no exception from the
rule. Death himself is personified in the poem having “reared himself a throne”
(Poe 1.1), and the use of words generally describing castles (turret, tower)
along with “Babylon-like walls” (Poe 2.7) invoke images of the common gothic
setting. The poem reminded me of Poe’s “Annabel Lee” quite a bit due to the
biblical imagery of heaven and hell within “The City in the Sea” and “Annabel
Lee” containing references to angels, heaven and demons. The two poems are
further connected as they both take place by the sea with loss being described.
The death of Annabel in “Annabel Lee” and the loss of the city as “down, down
that town shall settle hence, / Hell, rising” (Poe 4.9-10).
Dickinson compared to Poe has some similarities and some differences.
While both poets commonly used the gothic element of death, the style of
Dickinson lends more to a mystical or “ephemeral” (Dickinson Style Page) than
the straight out gothic style of Poe. The poetry of Dickinson commonly uses
4-line stanzas and is peppered with dashes and capitalizations of words that do
not always seem to have a discernible meaning. Unlike Poe whose poems almost
always rhyme, Dickinson only occasionally uses rhyme, and in “[I heard a fly
buzz, when I died]” rhyme is not used in any obvious way. The poems structure
“definite beginning, open ending… images become less precise and more
suggestive” (Dickinson Style Page) is another common element to Dickinson’s
poetry that sets her apart from either Poe or Whitman and is featured in this
particular poem.
Whitman’s style tends to be the least formal, and he was known for his
use of free verse in his poetry. While Whitman writes in free verse other
elements of poetry exist in his works that stand out. Specifically Whitman uses
catalog in “When I heard the Learn’d Astronomer” in lines 2 and 3. Compared to
the other two poets Whitman is the least gothic though he does not completely
stay away from the style with lines such as “mystical moist night-air” (Whitman
7). This particular poem surprised me with its brevity. The other poems we read
by Whitman this semester were much longer in comparison, but his use of time
passing and traveling from one location to another, an element of a romance
narrative, is still there. Whitman’s poetry topics tend to be more everyday
events rather than the extremes of Poe and Dickinson. Whitman also writes in a
way that is close to realism due to his subject matter and his word choice,
however Whitman stays within the realm of Romanticism with his solitude at the
end of the poem and his ties to nature with the line “look’d up in perfect
silence at the stars” (Whitman 8) almost heading towards the sublime with the
end of the poem.
By comparing Poe, Dickinson, and Whitman, the many forms that lyric
poetry can take are shown. Their use of the same Romanticism elements with such
different results also shows the variety within Romanticism.
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