Romantic Poets I. Walt Whitman

　　1.life

　　2.work: Leaves of Grass （9 editions）

　　（1）Song of Myself

　　（2）There Was a Child Went Forth

　　（3）Crossing Brooklyn Ferry

　　（4）Democratic Vistas

　　（5）Passage to India

　　（6）Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking

　　3.themes  ※Catalogue of American and European thought§

　　He had been influenced by many American and European thoughts: enlightenment, idealism, transcendentalism, science, evolution ideas, western frontier spirits, Jefferson＊s individualism, Civil War Unionism, Orientalism.

　　Major themes in his poems （almost everything）:

　　lequality of things and beings

　　ldivinity of everything

　　limmanence of God

　　ldemocracy

　　levolution of cosmos

　　lmultiplicity of nature

　　lself-reliant spirit

　　ldeath, beauty of death

　　lexpansion of America

　　lbrotherhood and social solidarity （unity of nations in the world）

　　lpursuit of love and happiness

　　4.style: ※free verse§

　　（1）no fixed rhyme or scheme

　　（2）parallelism, a rhythm of thought

　　（3）phonetic recurrence

　　（4）the habit of using snapshots

　　（5）the use of a certain pronoun ※I§

　　（6）a looser and more open-ended syntactic structure

　　（7）use of conventional image

　　（8）strong tendency to use oral English

　　（9）vocabulary powerful, colourful, rarely used words of foreign origins, some even wrong

　　（10）  sentences catalogue technique: long list of names, long poem lines

　　5.influence

　　（1）His best work has become part of the common property of Western culture.

　　（2）He took over Whitman＊s vision of the poet-prophet and poet-teacher and recast it in a more sophisticated and Europeanized mood.

　　（3）He has been compared to a mountain in American literary history.

　　（4）Contemporary American poetry, whatever school or form, bears witness to his great influence.

　　II. Emily Dickenson

　　1.life

　　2.works

　　（1）My Life Closed Twice before Its Close

　　（2）Because I Can＊t Stop for Death

　　（3）I Heard a Fly Buzz  When I died

　　（4）Mine  by the Right of the White Election

　　（5）Wild Nights  Wild Nights

　　3.themes: based on her own experiences/joys/sorrows

　　（1）religion  doubt and belief about religious subjects

　　（2）death and immortality

　　（3）love  suffering and frustration caused by love

　　（4）physical aspect of desire

　　（5）nature  kind and cruel

　　（6）free will and human responsibility

　　4.style

　　（1）poems without titles

　　（2）severe economy of expression

　　（3）directness, brevity

　　（4）musical device to create cadence （rhythm）

　　（5）capital letters  emphasis

　　（6）short poems, mainly two stanzas

　　（7）rhetoric techniques: personification  make some of abstract ideas vivid

　　III.    Comparison: Whitman vs. Dickinson

　　1.Similarities:

　　（1）Thematically, they both extolled, in their different ways, an emergent America, its expansion, its individualism and its Americanness, their poetry being part of ※American Renaissance§.

　　（2）Technically, they both added to the literary independence of the new nation by breaking free of the convention of the iambic pentameter and exhibiting a freedom in form unknown before: they were pioneers in American poetry.

　　2.differences:

　　（1）Whitman seems to keep his eye on society at large; Dickinson explores the inner life of the individual.

　　（2）Whereas Whitman is ※national§ in his outlook, Dickinson is ※regional§.

　　（3）Dickinson has the ※catalogue technique§ （direct, simple style） which Whitman doesn＊t have.

　　Edgar Allen Poe

　　I. Life

　　II. Works

　　1.short stories

　　（1）ratiocinative stories

　　a. Ms Found in a Bottle

　　b. The Murders in the Rue Morgue

　　c. The Purloined Letter

　　（2）Revenge, death and rebirth

　　a. The Fall of the House of Usher

　　b. Ligeia

　　c. The Masque of the Red Death

　　（3）Literary theory

　　a. The Philosophy of Composition

　　b. The Poetic Principle

　　c. Review of Hawthorne＊s Twice-told Tales

　　III.    Themes

　　1.death  predominant theme in Poe＊s writing

　　※Poe is not interested in anything alive. Everything in Poe＊s writings is dead.§

　　2.disintegration （separation） of life

　　3.horror

　　4.negative thoughts of science

　　IV.     Aesthetic ideas

　　1.The short stories should be of brevity, totality, single effect, compression and finality.

　　2.The poems should be short, and the aim should be beauty, the tone melancholy. Poems should not be of moralizing. He calls for pure poetry and stresses rhythm.

　　V.  Style  traditional, but not easy to read

　　VI.     Reputation: ※the jingle man§ （Emerson）

　　VII.  His influences