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LITR 4328: American Renaissance .png){kind=small} |
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Austin Green
Perfect Strangers
Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson were the three most
important poets of the American Renaissance.
All three are regarded as prolific poets of the era, and students can
gain many valuable lessons by studying their works. While all three were writing
their poetry during this era in time, they do stand apart from each other in
their style and form. By comparing all three together, we are able to get a
sound base for what poetry in what this still early America was like.
When looking over the course syllabus, I was pleased to see Poe featured
a few times. Of the three poets, Poe was the one I had the most prior experience
with, so was my defaulted favorite. Poe was the most formal of the three poets.
This means he usually wrote in traditional poetry forms like sonnets or ballads.
He usually wrote about the gothic and relied heavily on romanticism.
In Poe’s “The City in the Sea” we can see characteristics of Poe’s work
right from the first lines. The poem opens with Death building up a throne for
himself in a “strange city lying alone.” The rest of the poem continues this
trend of gothic themes and phrases: eternal rest, melancholy waters, redder
glow, and hell. By subject matter alone a reader could guess this is Poe. I
would even venture to assume that even someone not in a literature class, when
presented with these words and phrases, and told to guess who the poet is would
be able to guess Poe.
Poe uses the traditional forms to build up his poetry. If another poet
was building houses with the forms, Poe was building mansions. Poe’s poetry,
maybe even more than Dickinson and Whitman, almost demands its reader to read it
aloud: “There open fanes and gaping graves / Yawn level with the luminous waves;
But not the riches there that lie / In each idol’s diamond eye.” Regardless of
enjoyment of the story being told throughout the poem, Poe’s use of language
makes the poem seem almost musical. The rhyming of the end lines, the measured
beats matching when spoken. His imagery adds a sense of wonder and almost
timelessness to the poem.
Much like with Poe, from the title/opening line of “When I heard the
learn’d astronomer;” we can tell it is a Walt Whitman poem. Whitman playing the
language and the reader, rhyming heard with learn’d, but also using this
non-existent contraction to describe someone smart, an astronomer. Whitman wrote
in free verse. This means there might not be any overall rhyming scheme or
format followed throughout the poem. Instead of having rhymes because the format
demanded it, any rhymes are either for the fun of the language, or to be seen as
almost accidental. Whitman using free verse was one of the main developments
that fueled its use among poets ever since, including today.
As seen in “When I heard the learn’d astronomer,” Whitman’s poetry was
unique at the time. He writings questioned modern life and everything around it.
In the poem, the speaker is spending time listening to an astronomer talk about
space, but all our speaker sees are numbers and equations. He goes outside and
looks up at the stars and realizes that’s all he needs to do to know them. Just
seeing them is enough. All the numbers and equations the astronomer can say
cannot match what he sees when he looks up at the night’s sky.
Unlike Poe, who romanticized the world around him, Whitman was a realist
in his writings. Even in this poem we see him talking about an astronomer giving
a lecture about the math behind space and stars. He might be writing how he does
not find the awe in that, but the fact remains he is still himself writing about
“charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure
them.”
Emily Dickinson finds herself as sort of roaming in between the formal
style of Poe, and the free-verse style of Whitman. She uses formal styles when
needed, but has no issues dropping them to go in her own direction, changing the
format and making her own rules about punctuation, line breaks, and rhyming
schemes. Emily Dickinson was a big surprise to me over the semester. Familiar
with the name, but unable to really tell much about her or her work prior to
this course, she has become, along with Hawthorne, a standout to me in terms of
how much I enjoyed their work. To me, her work is layered in a way that Poe and
Whitman’s poetry is not. Each time I revisit one of Dickinson’s works, I keep
finding more and more meaning hidden away. A single poem for me (“The
Frost of Death was on the Pane—“ or “1136”, read outside
of class) started out as being a metaphor for man and nature always being in a
constant back and forth, then became a one-sided battle with man trying to fight
nature even though nature had already won, to then becoming a battle between
Emily Dickinson herself and her faith.
In “I heard a fly buzz when I died” we see all the characteristics of one
of Emily Dickinson’s poems. We see the line breaks punctuated with dashes, while
also having some lines have the dashes mid-sentence. It uses half rhythms like
eyes and dry. We see the abstract with lines like “With Blue – uncertain-
stumbling Buzz-“ when describing the fly. Throughout the entire poem it appears
Dickinson has decided on a whim what to capitalize, and what to lowercase. This
poem definitely takes a detour into the gothic. From the onset the speaker lets
us know the poem is about when they died. That itself creates a supernatural or
otherworldly tone to the rest of the reading.
With these three poems we can see the greatness that our poets possessed.
Individually, we can learn a great deal from each poet, but when placed together
it shows how wide the spectrum of poetry had become during the American
Renaissance. It really helps to understand the differences in forms: formal or
free verse. Viewing them together also helps give an understanding to the
difference between romanticism and realism.
