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LITR 4328: American Renaissance  |
Final Exam Essays 2015 Sample answers
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Cyndi Perkins
The Diversity of American Poets
Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson all represent the American
Renaissance in beautiful and unique ways. Each author has their own distinct
style and yet they share many similarities. All built upon conventional ideas of
poetry, but were able to expand the definition so that they could express
themselves without restraint. Poe, probably the most recognizable of these
poets, sticks closest to formal verse in his use of rhythm and rhyme to create
elaborate works delving into the darkest depths of the human psyche. Dickinson
toyed with formality, manipulating it to create imagery and tension, playfully
expressing her thoughts on the world. Whitman shirked all the rules to convey
his meanings directly to the audience, appealing to their emotions in a stark
and sometimes brutal ways. These three represent the diversity and ingenuity of
the American Romantic poets who lived during the mid to late nineteenth century.
In order to appreciate each of these poet’s unique styles and be able to compare
and contrast them, a solid understanding of lyric poetry is in order. We often
recognize any writing that has a musical quality, especially if it rhymes, as
lyrical. The Greeks actually told their stories against the background music of
a lyre, which is where the name comes from, and used rhyme and meter to help the
poets to remember their lines. This style has been passed down through the ages,
but has changed dramatically over that time into what we would refer to simply
as poetry. Song lyrics are a good example of this, but not usually elevated
enough in quality or content to be seen as true literature. Over time, since
artists can write and preserve their poetry, it has evolved into a much more
complex expression of individual feelings and ideas. These artists convey their
subjective views of the universe using all the tools of poetry such as rhythm,
rhyme, alliteration, assonance, and symbolism in tight, compact works that often
entire novels cannot express. They appeal to our senses, especially sight and
sound, to create intense imagery and feelings that we don’t soon forget.
Poe is probably the poet of the three to use as an example of more formal verse
(Comparative Study). He utilizes rhyme, rhythm, alliteration and assonance to
create a musical quality that becomes magical. He uses gothic imagery and
symbols to further create a darkly, fantastical realm. His writing is steeped in
the romance narrative of desire and loss (Poe Style Sheet). He uses these
techniques to investigate secrets of the mind, the ecstasy of desire and the
trauma loss. His poems are like puzzles themselves as the reader must navigate
his excessive, elaborate and often ostentatiously rich descriptions to discover
the meaning behind the words (P.S.S.). Unlike Dickinson and Whitman, he often
alludes to foreign worlds and an often legendary and heroic past (C. S). These
qualities, as well as his typical subject matter of the Gothic, make him more
than distinctive from some of his contemporaries such as Dickinson and Whitman.
His poem “The City in the Sea” is full of rhyme, alliteration and anaphora.
Though the rhyming seems to follow no formal pattern, it moves the imagery along
toward a crescendo, creating a sense of urgency and impending doom. He
personifies Death, giving him his own “throne” and “strange city” (1.1). Poe
describes Death’s kingdom with words that evoke images of lost castles and
cathedrals with “turrets,…domes, …spires,…[and] kingly halls” as well as lost
civilizations such as “Babylon” (2.4,6,7).
Though Death is something that comes to all of us as animals, it also comes to
the things we build. Finally even Death will end as Hell arises, evoking the
apocalyptic imagery of the Bible. Poe reminds us, using romantic images of lost
worlds which existed both in the mind and in reality to work out the natural
fear of death all humans have, that not even the personified Death himself can
escape the natural working of the universe. In several of his other poems we see
similar fixation with inevitable loss such as “Ligeia” and “The Raven,” in which
the protagonist laments over the loss of that we he desired most. Here, in this
poem, he laments over the greatest loss a human can suffer, death, and then over
the end of time.
Another of the American Romantic poets, Emily Dickinson is an interesting
transition between an artist, like Poe, who uses more formal verse and tends
toward more elevated language and one who doesn’t allow rhyming to stymy the
natural flow of his imagery, such as Whitman. Emily Dickinson experimented
heavily with rhyming schemes and rhythms, often breaking a thought with a hyphen
as if to put emphasis on the image (Dickinson Style Sheet). She seemed reluctant
to force her writing to fit poetic conventions and so allowed herself to be
fluid in punctuation, rhyme and meter. She did use a stanza format, but often
even played with this convention by adding in a five-line stanza to break up the
flow (D.S.S.). Like Poe, her poetry sometimes deals with the subject of death
and not necessarily in a pleasant way. Where she differs from Poe and is similar
to Whitman, is in her use of Transcendentalism. Though she was not a
transcendentalist herself, we can see its influence in her work (C.S.).
Her subjects, though still about large concepts such as humanity and
death, were conveyed in metaphors concerning everyday life.
Her poem “I Heard a Fly Buzz, When I Died,” seems to have born out of Dickinson
imagining her own death. The only true rhyme within the poem appears in the last
stanza, however, there is an internal rhyme within the first line of the second
stanza. She uses hyphens in all but three lines and uses no other conventional
poetic elements such as alliteration. This is very typical of Dickinson’s style
and gives the poem an ethereal, elusive feeling. Her subject matter, also a
common theme for her, deals with the moment of death. She imagines a “stillness
in the Room” that “[is] like the Stillness in the air-/Between the Heaves of
Storm” (1.2-4). She evokes imagery of the silence between thunderclaps, as if
life is one energetic phase and death may be another. Like Poe, she personifies
Death as a “King” who “Be witnessed-in the Room” who rules over the realm of
death. Her imagery, however does not continue into the fantastical, but comes
back down into the realistic, which is much more in the style of Whitman. It is
the fly, associated with death and decay, who invades the human world and proves
that nature can and will conquer. At this point, her imagery becomes paradoxical
and abstract as she uses synesthesia to describe an anxious and distressed
moment. The senses become confused when the fly “with Blue-uncertain-stumbling
Buzz” (4.1). It seems she is grasping for an idea or a sentiment and has to wade
through the symbolic to try to make sense of it. This eludes to the
Transcendentalism that she often expresses, that likens her to Whitman in a
search for a higher plane of thinking and being. If the protagonist had believed
she had a escaped the world and was reaching some higher plane, she is realizing
now that the real, natural world has interjected and caused confusion. She has
“failed” and now “[can] not see to see” (4.3-4). Some of her other poems, for
example “I Felt a Funeral in My Brain,” also use death as a metaphor for
exploring human emotions such as loss. “I Heard a Buzz, When I died”, however,
may be going beyond that to imagine what death may actually be like (C.S.).
Walt Whitman, as America’s most influential poet, is the most realistic of the
three and tries to offer poetic visions of common, ordinary life (Whitman Style
Sheet). He and Dickinson both deal with the subjects of everyday life in their
poetry, though Whitman uses more honest and concrete details to display his
thoughts and feelings. This can be a shock to reader, however his artistry and
ability to convey the events that every human has to deal with endears him to us
(W.S.S.). Though Whitman did not every use regular rhyme like Poe or Dickinson
experimented with, he did use other poetic conventions such as metaphor,
alliteration and assonance (W.S.S). He also included more formal poetic elements
such as anaphora/parallelism and cataloging which helps to create a rhythmic
flow when reading out loud. Though much of his subject matter deals primarily
with the regular people who lived on farms or worked in the cities, he is still
considered Romantic because he presented instances of heroic individualism and
sometimes used the format of the quest (W.S.S.). He also depicted imagery of the
natural world as well as the beauty of human relationships (W.S.S.). Where he
may differ the most from Poe and Dickinson is that he was always pushing for
ideas such as equality which meant he was dealing with the here and now. Poe
often explored human emotion and the pleasure and pain of human experience.
Dickinson often investigated the meaning of what it meant to be human. Whitman,
however, wrote about realistic people who had realistic problems with urgency.
His poem “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer,” Whitman uses absolutely no
formal rhyme, although the first line seems to contain an internal rhyme. The
short poem is packed with anaphora, parallelisms and cataloguing which creates a
natural flow as it carries the reader from one thought to the next. The
protagonist is listening to a scientist explain how he has been able to reduce
the mysteries of the universe, and by extension nature and human life, to
“proofs” and “figures” (2). The astronomer has endless “charts” and “diagrams”
in which he can provide evidence that anyone can “add, divide, and measure”
humanity and its place within the cosmos (3). The protagonist realizes, upon
hearing the “applause” of the audience, that the others listening
enthusiastically regard this information as truth (4). He is “tired and sick” as
he realizes the propensity of man to want to explain all the mysteries of the
natural world so it can be controlled. This could also be a comment on the
desire to control human nature as well. He decides to leave the group and go
outside alone. This could allude to the importance of individualism and not
following the crowd, but thinking for yourself. In the seventh line he uses the
word “mystical”, which reminds us of the language of Poe, and seems that Whitman
understands that everything can and maybe should not be explained. As he glances
at the “perfect silence” of the “starts” the reader feels a calming effect. The
protagonist, though unhappy about Man’s endeavor to conquer and control all of
nature, he realizes that nature is far more powerful and in the end, will
prevail. Like Dickinson, Whitman uses an ordinary event to express elevated
ideas and emotions. The protagonist is saddened by the idea that if humans think
they have figured out the mysteries of the world, then they will stop searching.
Whitman’s poem, “There was a Child who Went Forth,” evokes the imagery of a
being who is never done experiencing, discovering and learning as the “child
who went forth every day, and who now goes, and will always go forth every day”
(41). If this is Whitman’s typical ideal of how humans should interact with the
world, then the protagonist of “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” can be seen
as distraught over the claim that there is no reason to keep trying to learn and
grow as a species.
Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman represent the best of not just
American Romantic poetry, but of all poetry. Though each has their own, specific
and gorgeous way of creating images, they all explore what it means to be human
in an ever-changing world. Poe delves deep into the human psyche, forcing the
reader to face their worst fears and anxieties until they are exhausted.
Dickinson offers brand new ways to think about the most human subjects, such as
family, community and death. Walt Whitman asks us to think constantly about who
we are as, not just Americans, but as humans. Each of these poets manipulated
the conventional lyric poem to fit their own endeavor to express themselves. By
studying these poets and how they relate to each other, we can learn much about
rich tapestry of emotion and intellect that makes us human.
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