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Kimberly Hall
December 7, 2016
Poetry In Motion: The Inconsistency of American Renaissance Poetry
Poe, Whitman, and Dickinson seem at first glance to have nothing in
common. Though they are all lyric poets, they each have a distinctive style,
though they sometimes deviate from it–Emily Dickinson, in fact, makes
inconsistency her trademark, while Poe sticks to formal verse and Whitman moves
onto free verse. What they most have in common is that they reflect the
ingenuity and transformation of the various ideas that make up the American
Renaissance as a period.
Edgar Allan Poe is the textbook example of a gothic Romantic writer, and
is probably the most recognizable of American poets. The musical quality of his
writing as well as its surreal, gothic content are not difficult to pick out of
a poetry line-up.
The
City in the Sea
is, in many ways, an extremely characteristic example of Poe’s poetry. The poem
itself works in formal verse–that is, it has a fixed rhyme and rhythm
scheme–which, as stated in the Poe Style Sheet, is characteristic of Poe’s work.
Combined with the dreaminess of the imagery, the poetry sounds musical when read
aloud. Also characteristic of Poe are mythological allusions (“up Babylon-like
walls”) and European gothic images of ancient architecture (“Time-eaten towers”
and “shadowy long-forgotten bowers”). Both of these aspects give the poetry a
sense of history or timelessness. Probably Poe’s most distinctive rhetorical
technique, though, is his use of excess. In “The City in the Sea”, Poe uses
phrases like “the worst and the best/Have gone to their eternal rest” and “Death
looks gigantically down”; these words indicating extremes have the effect of
intensifying whatever it is Poe is describing. Intense images and emotions are a
trademark of Romanticism, even more so for Poe than for other poets of the time.
The only uncharacteristically-Poe aspect of this poem is that there is some
deviation in the rhyme scheme in different stanzas.
Walt Whitman writes on the opposite end of the Romantic poetry spectrum
as Poe, being the Romantic poet that is stylistically closest to the realists
(Comparative Study of Poe, Whitman, Dickinson). Whitman was the first American
poet to write extensively in free verse, without a fixed rhyme or rhythm scheme,
which was revolutionary in the 1800s. Whitman also worked with more everyday
subject matter than Poe, who tended towards theatricality and grandeur.
When I Heard the Learn’d
Astronomer is quite characteristic of Whitman’s work, even in the title–as
noted in the Whitman Style Sheet, a particular stylistic eccentricity of Walt
Whitman is that he occasionally drops silent vowels. This ensures that the
reader reads certain words as they would speak them; in
When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer,
dropping the ‘e’ in the word ‘learn’d’ ensures that one does not pronounce it as
‘learn-ed’, with two syllables. Other examples of this include “wander’d off”
and “Look’d up”, from the same poem, and “pass’d” and “fresh-cheek’d” found in
Whitman’s There Was a Child Went Forth.
Whitman tends to make extensive use of anaphora, which is the repetition of a
word or phrase in successive clauses; for instance, the first four lines of
When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer
all start with the word “When”. This, along with long lines, give the poem even
more of a speech-like cadence, as well as a sense of inclusiveness (Whitman
Style Sheet). This speech-like quality is common in free verse poetry, and
especially common in Walt Whitman’s.
Another common characteristic of Whitman’s poetry found in
When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer
is the combination of Romantic theme with realistic detail. The poem itself
catalogues details in rapid succession (“the proofs, the figures, were ranged in
columns before me;/When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide,
and measure them”), as is characteristic of realism, but keeps the Romantic
wonder of nature at the forefront, with the poet “In the mystical moist
night-air” and staring in awe at the stars instead of learning about them
scientifically. This combination tends to set Whitman apart from other poets of
the American Renaissance, and make his poetry pretty recognizable. The most
uncharacteristic aspect of this particular poem is simply its length–When
I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer only has eight lines, and in my experience,
Whitman’s poems tend to be significantly longer.
As a poet, Emily Dickinson exists in the middle-ground of Poe and
Whitman. Dickinson’s poems tend to have a formal base, like a quatrain, and
often discuss gothic themes like imminent death and psychological distress, both
of which are similar to Poe; however, her poetry also experiments with the rhyme
and meter, often making use of slant rhymes and unconventional punctuation
(Comparative Study of Poe, Whitman, Dickinson).
This unconventional punctuation is exemplified in
[I heard a fly buzz when I died]–while
the poem has a formal base, only three out of sixteen lines do not have at least
one dash, and while the dashes themselves could represent an intended pause or
change in rhythm, they do not seem to have a singular, definite purpose. There
is also inconsistent capitalization throughout the poem–for example, “stillness”
in line 2 is lowercase, while the same word is capitalized in line 3–which is
characteristic of Dickinson’s poetry. Even more characteristic of Dickinson is
the use of synesthetic imagery, as seen in line 13: “With
Blue–uncertain–stumbling Buzz–“. The sound of a fly buzzing is described using
both color and motion, neither of which are typically linked to audition. One
aspect of Dickinson’s poetry that makes it especially distinct from Whitman’s
and Poe’s is the consistent inconsistency–that is, rules or thoughts that apply
in one poem may not apply in another, which is decidedly different from the two
other poets in this essay.
Poe, Whitman, and Dickinson all represent the diverse kinds of poetry
that falls within the American Renaissance period. While they each have their
own trademarks and poetic calling cards, they consistently demonstrate that one
common characteristic of American Renaissance poetry is its innovation and
inconsistency.
