Early Modern Poets

Paper Summary:

The paper examines the poetry of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson and shows how each contributed their unique American voice to American modern poetry. The paper analyzes both the romantic and modern features of their works and illustrates how these poems are clearly a break with the romantic, European-dominated past.

From the Paper:

"During and after the Civil War American poetry and other American literature started to become uniquely American (as opposed to strongly European-influenced, as it had always been before): thematically; stylistically, and in terms of form and subject matter. During this difficult period in United States history America was perhaps finally also discovering a national 'selfhood' apart from Europe's long-overshadowing influences, including literary ones. Modernism in literature (like Romanticism before it) is difficult to define; but by comparing, say, Edgar Allan Poe's gothic macabre poem The Raven against T.S. Eliot's impressionistic celebration of the grittily mundane The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock one may see some distinctions."

Sample of Sources Used:

• Dickinson, Emily. 258 [There's a certain Slant of light,]. 5 Dec 2007< http://www.online-literature.com/dickinson/830/>.
• Schwartz, Sanford, The Matrix of Modernism: Pound, Eliot, and Early Twentieth Century Thought, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985.
• The Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson. Thomas H. Johnson (Ed.). New York: Back Bay, January 30, 1976.
• "Walt Whitman 1819-1882." The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Vol. 1, 5th Ed. Nina Baym et al. (Eds). New York: Norton, 1998. 2076-2080.
• Whitman, Walt. "Song of Myself." The Harper American Literature, Volume 2, 2nd Ed. Donald Mc Quade et al. (Eds.). New York: Longman, 1993. 56-102.

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