Emily Dickenson (1830-1886)
Emily Dickenson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, to a prominent family. For one year she attended Mount Holyoke Female Seminary (now College), in nearby South Hadley then withdrew and returned to Amherst. Her adult life was as short on external incident as it was long on imagination. Dickenson lived at her family home in Amherst from 1848 on, she rarely received visitors, and in her mature years she never went out. Suffering from agoraphobia (the fear of public place) and perhaps from an eye disorder called exotropia, she became known as “Myth” and “the character of Amherst.” Fewer than a dozen of her poems were published in her lifetime. Such a solitary life hardly dulled her sensibilities, however, for Dickinson’s collected works—nearly two thousand poems, plus voluminous correspondence—brim with intense feeling, from terror to joy. The poems also reveal her intimate knowledge of the Bible, classical myth, and the works of Shakespeare; in addition, she admired the work of Transcendentalists Thoreau and Emerson and read the Brontes, the Brownings, Keats, and George Eliot. In an era marked by its evangelical fervor, Dickinson adopted skepticism—though she did not arrive at it easily—and her poems are remarkable for their irony, ambiguity, paradox, and sardonic wit. She succinctly defined her aesthetic in the epigrammatic lines “Tell the Truth but tell it slant-/ Success in Circuit lies,” and she once told a friend: “If I read a book (and) it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” She wrote in the meters of hymns and made masterful use of the ballad stanza, often using slant rhyme. Although her innovations initially baffled critics, the public’s fascination with her life soon extended to her verse. She is, along with Walt Whitman, the most revered and influential of nineteenth-century American poets. (Biographical Summary from Norton's Anthology of Poetry, 4th Edition.)
Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
Walt Whitman was born on Long Island, New York, and raised in Brooklyn. He left school at the age of eleven and worked as an office boy, a printer’s apprentice, and a teacher before establishing himself as a journalist affiliated with several prominent New York newspapers. In 1862, deeply moved by the scenes he witnessed while staying with his brother (a wounded Union soldier) in Washington, D.C., he spent several months visiting and nursing Civil War veterans. After the war, Whitman worked briefly at the Department of the Interior—he was fired for being the author of the “scandalous” Leaves of Grass (1855) – and for several years at the office of the attorney general. After suffering a debilitating stroke in 1873, he moved to his brother’s home in Camden, New Jersey, where he remained until his death. In Leaves of Grass, his masterpiece, Whitman assumed the mantle of the public poet; his preface to the 1855 edition calls “the United States themselves” his subject. Although his poetry offers a Transcendentalist view of the human being as wholly attuned with divine creation, individual poems that celebrated the body and sexuality opened him up to charges of obscenity. His prosody proved as controversial as his subject matter, and one critic stated that he was “as unacquainted with art as a hog is with mathematics.” In fact, Whitman’s refusal to follow the prevailing taste for regular meter, standard forms, and studied artifice was based on long and careful thought. His direct, realistic, intense, and exuberant poems have profoundly influenced modern poetry (for instance, William Carlos Williams’ Paterson and the work of the Beats) as well as American culture. (Biographical Summary from Norton's Anthology of Poetry, 4th Edition.)
No comments:
Post a Comment