ENG 425SEM

Close study of these influential poets in relation to their lives, cultures, and audiences, with attention to gender, sexuality, and publication histories. For example: Prof. C. Miller These two great mid-nineteenth century American poets can seem like complete opposites in the style, manner, and focus of their poems. As this course will demonstrate, however, there are remarkable similarities between them and each is responsible for poetic innovations still influencing poets today. Similarly, each performs multiple forms of selfhood, resulting in very complex patterns of thought and representation. The shy hermit believes passionately in human community and writes extraordinary love poems; the most outrageous lover of all writes exquisitely of isolation and loneliness. Both Whitman and Dickinson participate enthusiastically in the popular culture and share many attitudes of their time, and both are singular and anomalous. During the semester, we will focus primarily on reading large numbers of poems in relation to performances of selfhood, nineteenth-century conventions of gender, sexuality, and race, the Civil War, the poets vastly differing publication choices and histories. We will also spend time analyzing formal properties of the two very different kinds of verse, and talking about what it means to hear and speak (as well as read) these poems.

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