American Romanticism Sample Student Final Exam Answers 2010

Veronica Ramirez

Forging bridges: Poetry for all Romantic Souls

Poetry it seems is literature’s most elemental and complex form.  It does, in limited space, what a novel may only hope to accomplish. It gathers observations of images, events, or feelings, and wraps them in passions such as hatred, anger, joy or love and tries to portray this to the reader.  American Romantic poetry is essential for transmitting thoughts and values of the American culture to the current reader.  If the reader is able to receive, understand and connect with the poem, “The poem ascends” as Levertov states in “The Jacob's Ladder”, and so does the reader. 

Poetry in the American Renaissance, dealt with many different spheres of influence, many topics and subjects. The values and thoughts in the poetry can be political such as the Harlem renaissance poets tried to show the world the injustices, tried to humanize the suppressed black community by showing feelings and thoughts, and tried to empower the community.  The poetry can also serve to show the values of a community, as writers such as Anne Bradstreet and Frances Sargent Locke Osgood show, it allowed them to showcase a woman’s perspective and a glimpse into the domestic sphere.  

As I stated in my essay “Quest for Romantic Knowledge:   Fall 2010”, one of the major aspects of the class that I really enjoyed was seeing texts from before, during and after the Romantic period.  For the poetry discussions, I benefited a lot from pointing out details, words, or themes that were of romantic nature even if the poem was from before or beyond the time frame that we were looking at.  I have not taken a poetry course and would have benefited from more instruction on poetry structure, styles, forms, etc.

The two poems that I selected, “Dare you see a Soul at the White Heat?” by Emily Dickinson and “Blackberrying” by Sylvia Plath, both fit Objective 1C as lyric poems that exhibit Romantic aspirations. There is a definite path or journey, Plath’s blackberry path is a physical journey to the sea, and Dickinson’s is a more transcendent journey, but both still are emotionally defining experiences. They are also both romantic since they both have an out of this world, dream like quality.

  These two poems fulfill our other class objectives, “Blackberrying” has an individual in nature, “Nobody in the lane, and nothing, nothing but blackberries,” that aligns perfectly to Objective 1a Romantic Spirit or Ideology of an individual in nature.    “Dare you see a Soul at the White Heat” has a romance narrative as part of Objective 1a, “transgressing social or psychological boundaries in order to attain or regain some transcendent goal or dream” as the soul is straightened and refined as in “That soundless tugs- within-/Refining these impatient Ores” .

They both appeal to the sense of sight by using Gothic colors and very vivid images. Emily Dickinson uses the Gothic colors to signify purity, by “White Heat” a heat so hot that it is white, she also uses “Red—is the Fire's common tint” to signify the burning and purifying qualities of fire.   Sylvia Plath also uses Gothic colors, red and black as blood and death, “With blue-red juices. These they squander on my fingers. / I had not asked for such a blood sisterhood;“  and black, as in the black birds, “Overhead go the choughs in black, cacophonous flocks” and an implied death by the blackness of flies covering a bush “come to one bush of berries so ripe it is a bush of flies,/ Hanging their bluegreen bellies and their wing pane”.

One of the transcendent qualities of Emily Dickinson’s poem “Dare  you see a Soul at the White Heat?” is the refinement of the soul created using an  image of straightening and refining a metal, through a physical working of the material.  This same image appears in “Blueberries” by Sylvia Plath as she states “nothing but a great space/Of white and pewter lights, and a din like silversmiths/Beating and beating at an intractable metal.” These two poems connect in my mind beyond Romantic themes; they also make poetry more universal to all types of readers, joining theory, science and nature.  Romanticism helps me read these poems because I can extract certain images that I would have glanced over before and helps me see the overall intent of the poem.