Winslow Homer's 1885 painting "The Fog Warning" depicts a scene from the Massachusetts coast. It shows several fishermen preparing their boats as a dense fog rolls in. In just a few sentences, the painting is summarized as depicting fishermen on the Massachusetts coast preparing their boats as a dense fog moves in.
Winslow Homer's 1885 painting "The Fog Warning" depicts a scene from the Massachusetts coast. It shows several fishermen preparing their boats as a dense fog rolls in. In just a few sentences, the painting is summarized as depicting fishermen on the Massachusetts coast preparing their boats as a dense fog moves in.
Winslow Homer's 1885 painting "The Fog Warning" depicts a scene from the Massachusetts coast. It shows several fishermen preparing their boats as a dense fog rolls in. In just a few sentences, the painting is summarized as depicting fishermen on the Massachusetts coast preparing their boats as a dense fog moves in.
Winslow Homer's 1885 painting "The Fog Warning" depicts a scene from the Massachusetts coast. It shows several fishermen preparing their boats as a dense fog rolls in. In just a few sentences, the painting is summarized as depicting fishermen on the Massachusetts coast preparing their boats as a dense fog moves in.
• He was born in New York into a working-class family in 1819.
• He had little formal education.
• At eleven he started to work as
an office boy and then became a printer’s apprentice for a local newspaper. Walt Whitman
• He became a journalist supporting radical democratic causes.
Performer - Culture & Literature
Walt Whitman & Emily Dickinson
1. Walt Whitman: life
• He travelled widely through his country.
• He acquired a self-taught culture
including the Bible, Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Carlyle, Goethe, Hegel, Emerson, oriental religion and philosophy.
• In 1855 he published the first
edition of Leaves of Grass. Walt Whitman
• Nine editions followed, each containing new
poems. Performer - Culture & Literature Walt Whitman & Emily Dickinson
1. Walt Whitman: life
• The third one, in 1860, aroused the indignation of puritanical readers and gained Whitman a reputation for obscenity and homosexuality.
• During the Civil War he
visited wounded soldiers in the army hospitals.
• He continued to Performer - Culture & Literature believe in the value of democracy and Walt Whitman & Emily Dickinson
1. Walt Whitman: life
• The fourth edition of Leaves of Grass (1867) contained poems on the Civil War and on the death of President Lincoln.
• In 1873 he retired to Camden, New Jersey, where he was visited by admirers and disciples.
• He died in 1892.
Performer - Culture & Literature
Walt Whitman & Emily Dickinson
2. Walt Whitman: his
influence • Whitman’s popularity in Europe grew in the 1870s, especially appreciated by the Aesthetic Movement.
• He influenced later poets such as Ezra Pound,
Carl Sandburg, and, more recently, the Beat Generation.
• He is generally regarded as the father of
American poetry, as the first voice that was distinctly new and ‘American’.
Performer - Culture & Literature
Walt Whitman & Emily Dickinson
3. Leaves of Grass (1855) • Published on 4th July American Independence Day
• Included a preface where the
author introduced the subject matter, the language and the aim of his poetry.
• Not a collection of poems but
a life-long poem. Walt Whitman
Performer - Culture & Literature
Walt Whitman & Emily Dickinson
3. Leaves of Grass (1855) • A total of nine different editions published between 1855 and 1892.
• Implied a process of development
and expansion resulting from a transcendental sense of the unity of all things.
• All of life and experience, reality
itself, were a process, a continuing, all-embracing flow.
Performer - Culture & Literature
Walt Whitman & Emily Dickinson
4. Themes of Whitman’s poetry • Optimism and romantic faith in the dynamic future of the American nation.
• Democracy and the
‘American dream’.
• The self-celebration of the
poet as a prophet of his country.
• The dignity of the individual, conceived as the
unity of body and soul. Performer - Culture & Literature Walt Whitman & Emily Dickinson
5. Song of Myself
In Song of Myself Whitman divided his being into
three. • Myself Whitman’s poetic personality
• Me self Whitman’s inner personality
• My soul An enigma, unexpected otherness
Performer - Culture & Literature
Walt Whitman & Emily Dickinson
5. Song of Myself
Song of Myself celebrates the meeting
between
• The ‘I’ Whose reality is constantly
questioned
• The ‘you’ The ‘other’, ‘whoever you are’
Performer - Culture & Literature
Walt Whitman & Emily Dickinson
6. Whitman’s style • Use of free verse.
• Long lines where rhythm is
determined by the thought or emotion expressed.
• Use of accumulation and addition.
• The participle often replaces the
finite verb.
• Use of dialect and common speech.
• Few similes and metaphors.
Performer - Culture & Literature
Walt Whitman & Emily Dickinson
7. Emily Dickinson: life
• She was born into a middle-class Puritan family in Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1830.
• Her father, a lawyer
and a politician, influenced her emotional development and religious belief. Emily Dickinson
• She received her
university education at Mount Holyoke Female Performer - Culture & Literature
Seminary. Walt Whitman & Emily Dickinson
7. Emily Dickinson: life
• She refused to declare her faith in public, as required by the Puritan tradition.
• She interrupted her studies and
returned home.
• She began a life of seclusion and
only wore white clothes as Emily Dickinson
ambiguous emblems of spiritual
marriage and singleness.
• She never left her father’s house
except for some walks in the garden.
Performer - Culture & Literature
Walt Whitman & Emily Dickinson
7. Emily Dickinson: life
• She died in 1886.
• Poems by Emily Dickinson
appeared in 1890 published by the literary critic Thomas W. Higginson.
• A complete edition of her poems
appeared in 1955, edited by Thomas Johnson.
• A collection of her letters was
published in 1958.
Performer - Culture & Literature
Walt Whitman & Emily Dickinson
8. Influences on Dickinson • The Bible, Shakespeare, Milton, the Metaphysical poets.
• Contemporary writers like
Emily Brontë.
• The Puritan tradition.
The Homestead, • Emerson’s East Facade
Transcendentalism.
Performer - Culture & Literature
Walt Whitman & Emily Dickinson
9. Dickinson vs. Whitman Emily Dickinson Walt Whitman
• The poet of what is • The poet of
broken and absent. wholeness. • Detached from • Deeply interested and contemporary taste, involved in the issues from the great events of his time. and contrasts of the age. • Poetry of celebration. • Poetry of isolation. • His task was to • respond to the spirit Used her poetry to challenge received of his country, to give certainties. voice to the common man. Performer - Culture & Literature Walt Whitman & Emily Dickinson
10. Themes in Dickinson’s poetry • Death and loss. • Love and desire. • Time. • Fear, sorrow and despair. • God. • Nature. • Man’s relation to the universe.
Performer - Culture & Literature
Walt Whitman & Emily Dickinson
11. The theme of death
Death from the point of view of:
•the person dying;
•a witness.
Death the great mystery, connected with
eternity, a liberation from anxiety.
Death the place where the human being tends
to, in order to become one with the universe.
Performer - Culture & Literature
Walt Whitman & Emily Dickinson
12. The theme of love
Love is explored through a full range of emotions:
•from ecstatic and sensual celebration
•to the despair due to separation.
Love expectation of eternity as the hope of a
final spiritual union.
Performer - Culture & Literature
Walt Whitman & Emily Dickinson
13. The theme of nature
Different from man: a source of wonder or fear.
Can be presented:
•through an objective description;
•by juxtaposing the thing observed and the soul of the
observer the natural datum leads to philosophical speculation;
•as a source of imagery to emphasise an abstract concept or
theme.
Performer - Culture & Literature
Walt Whitman & Emily Dickinson
14. Dickinson’s style
• Poems do not have a title.
• Short poems, organised in simple
quatrains.
• Use of monosyllabic words.
• Terms from various sources:
law, geometry, engineering.
• Use of rhetorical devices such as
imperfect rhymes, assonance, alliteration, paradox, metaphor, ellipsis and capitalisation.
