Analysis of Dickinson's 'I felt a Funeral' & Whitman's 'Leaves of Grass': Puritan Elements, Appunti di Letteratura Angloamericana

Scarica Analysis of Dickinson's 'I felt a Funeral' & Whitman's 'Leaves of Grass': Puritan Elements e più Appunti in PDF di Letteratura Angloamericana solo su Docsity! MODULO A Contesto storico. The Norton Anthology (Beginnings to 1820) + Saggio di Luca Briasco + appunti lezioni + slides Puritanism + Saggio di Simpson. The history of the British colonies on North American soil can be linked to two opposing interpretations: ▪ unitarian interpretation → states that the patterns of territorial penetration contained elements of homogeneity such that they inherently contained within themselves the foundations of what would later be the future federal nation. ▪ particularistic interpretation → believes that these elements of homogeneity arose only after many years and with no little effort, and that therefore the sense of a federal nation was late in coming. ► Luca Briasco's interpretation can be described as a "middle way" between the two ideas. English penetration of the New World came a century later than other settlement attempts that had occurred: ▪ the earliest was in 1585, ninety years - without significant exploration attempts - after Christopher Columbus; ▪ between 1499 and 1502 Amerigo Vespucci's coastal explorations made a decisive contribution to knowledge of the new continent; ▪ in 1500 Portuguese explorer Cabral sailing to the Indies discovered Brazil; ▪ in 1513 Spanish explorer Balboa first reached the Pacific Ocean via the Isthmus of Panama; ▪ between 1519 and 1521 Magellan completed the first circumnavigation of the earth, even empirically proving its sphericity. There were already recognizably imperial states in the Americas before Columbus’s voyage, the Aztecs had consolidated an empire in today’s Mexico, and over the course of the fourteenth century the Inca Empire had expanded the territory from what is now southern Colombia to Chile. → because of the Aztec and Inca presences, the view of European conquest was particularly strong in Spanish accounts. ► the conquistador Hernán Cortés described the sophistication and wealth that existed in the Aztec capital before he ordered his forces to destroy it. In a more muted way, Smith will later portray English interactions with the Indians as the product of their competing imperial projects. When the Europeans arrived in the Americas, the indigenous people numbered between fifty million and one hundred million. Mass deaths among the indigenous communities facilitated European expansion. ► Faced with this sudden decline in Native workers, Spain introduced African slavery there as early as 1501. In 1522, the first real major slave rebellion in the Americas took place on the island, when enslaved African Muslims killed nine Spaniards. From this point forward, slave resistance became commonplace. In 1828, Irving published a biography of Christopher Columbus, the explorer who sailed across the Atlantic four times on behalf of the Spanish Empire. Apparently, Columbus’s own writings provide a remarkable view into the radical changes that his voyage of 1492 set in motion. In his “Letter of Discovery” he describes the marvels that the crew encountered during the journey. Columbus praised the stunning island mountains, the many different types of trees and vegetation, the rivers that appeared to be full of gold, and the fertile soil. He described the indigenous population as welcoming, loosely organized, and largely defenseless. And he told how “in the first island that I came to, I took some of them by force.”, which meant he captured Natives —and took some of them with him on the return voyage to Europe— with the idea that Europeans and Natives could learn to communicate. Within a few decades, much of Central and South America was firmly in Spanish hands; having exhausted the thrust of the conquistadores, the Iberian colonial empire was organized around the structure of the encomienda, large estates granted by the king to the conquistadores, who, while they could demand tribute from the native Indians, had responsibility over their souls. Hence the attempt to put an end to the genocide to which the Amerindian peoples were being subjected, to replace it with their absorption within Western culture, including through the tireless work of Christianization by missionaries. England remained in a secluded position for a long time → the long civil war and the need for the new Tudor dynasty to focus its efforts on the process of centralizing power did not allow for the consistent pursuit of a colonial policy. The first interest in new trade routes to the Indies was the commission given in 1497 to the Florentine Giovanni Caboto, which led him to first sight the east coast of the North American continent. The first active phase of exploration coincided with the reign of Elizabeth I. The struggle against Spain, and the consequential attempts to pirate ships laden with gold and riches, pushed English ships to touch American soil more and more often. It was one of the protagonists of this war, Sir Francis Drake, who, between 1577 and 1580, carried out the second global circumnavigation. A decisive contribution to the colonizing drive was made by the profound economic and social transformations that spanned the entire Elizabethan age → the Enclosure Laws, (1) paving the way for an agricultural system based on large property, (2) ending the feudal tradition of common ownership of large tracts of land, and (3) hitting landowners (called "yeomen") hard, grafted a strong sense of the need for migration and a hunger for new land. ► The first colonies on American soil thus represent the perfect example of the conjunction of economic and territorial expansionism. The distinctiveness of the English model stands out even more clearly by comparison with the French explorations and settlements, which were also concentrated in the northern part of the continent: ▪ between 1608 and 1611, Samuel de Champlain founded Montréal and Québec, having taken possession of Newfoundland and Nova Scotia a few years earlier; ▪ in 1682 La Salle went up the course of the Mississippi River annexing its valley and christening it Louisiana in honor of the Sun King. By the end of the century, the French possessed a larger territory than the English: however, having failed a colonization attempt promoted by Minister Colbert, they limited themselves to building forts along the rivers to serve as stations for the fur trade. This model of expedition was perfected by a group of non-radicals who, gathered in the Massachusetts Bay Company, organized a much larger expedition, initiating the wave of migration that would make New England a culturally and ideologically compact set of states. 1630 → the Great Migration ( around 700 people ) → dissenting but NON-separating puritans led by John Winthrop who would later become governor. They founded the Massachusetts Bay colony. John Winthrop then gave a speech on board the Arbella about the ideals that he wanted the colonists to embrace, expressing that the eyes of the world were on them and that they should strive to be an example for all, considering to be as a city upon a hill. “wee must consider that wee shall be as a city upon a hill, the eies of all people are upon us: soe if we whall dele falsely with our God in this work wee have undertaken.. wee shall be made a story and a by-word throughout the world” → basically, “if we fail everyone will know or talk about it”. The religious formula they advocated was that of a "nonseparatist congregationalism," different from the Pilgrims' point of view: what’s interesting is that Massachusetts Bay colonists initially wanted to retain their ties (mantenere, recuperare i legami) with the Church of England - leading to their designation as non-Separating, less radical than Plymouth puritans -, but they shared basic beliefs with the Pilgrims: both groups agreed with Luther’s theory that no pope or bishop had the right to impose any law on a Christian without consent, and both groups accepted the Reformation theologian Calvin’s view that God freely chose (or “elected”) those he would save and those he would damn eternally. Can we talk about American exceptionalism? IN FACT, they did not call themselves exceptional. Thomas Bender says → we should distinguish between being exceptional and being special. (The US in World History: Transnationalism vs Exceptionalism) To them it was more of a Manifest Destiny (even though the phrase was coined in 1845). Manifest Destiny ► belief that the United States is destined—by God’s will—to expand its dominion and spread democracy across the American continent. In 1631, the English captain John Smith publishes Advertisements for the Unexperienced Planters of New England, or Any Where: […], the last and most famous of his works. Smith’s endorsement (sostegno esplicito) of English plantations in America strikes a discordant note. Smith anticipated such objections and writes “Many good religious men have made this great question, as a matter in conscience, by what warrant they might go to possess those Countries, which are none of theirs, but the poore Salvages [i.e., savages’, inteso come nativi],” he wrote. He then considers the answer to this objection evident: “for God did make the world to be inhabited with mankind, and to have his name known to all Nations, and from generation to generation.” ► Smith saw God’s hand behind England’s colonization of the Americas → he based his arguments for colonization on the precedents available in sacred history. Adam and Eve established a plantation, Smith argued, as did Noah and his family after the flood. It was clear to people that their fate was that of bringing their ideals everywhere → in fact it meant they had to conquer the land → political excuse to conquer, but it wasn’t out of presumption. Dissemination through dissent the Puritan colonies. The ideological compactness of the Puritans caused an extraordinary flowering of religious culture: in 1636 Harvard University was founded and in 1640 the Bay Psalm Book, the first book on American soil, was printed. At the same time, however, a sense of intolerance of any deviationism was growing. It’s inevitable that once you start living together with more people, if every single individual decides they have a truth and it doesn’t go together with another person’s truth, conflicts start. The increase in population alone would account for greater diversity of opinion. There were episodes of religious intolerance, due to the anxiety of witnessing an excessive fragmentation of churches, and thus, of the community: ▪ in 1635 → Roger Williams is expelled from Massachusetts because he supports religious tolerance. ► in 1636 he founds Rhode Island (and Providence), where he welcomes people of all faiths. ▪ in 1636 → Thomas Hooker decides to solve peacefully some conflicts that were born inside the Congregationalist Church, to which he belonged, by leaving the colony. ► he founds Hartford, around which the State of Connecticut would grow. ▪ in 1636-1638 → what has later been called the Antinomian Controversy takes place, which had Ann Hutchinson as champion and victim. ► She was expelled from the colony because she claimed that she could enjoy a direct relationship with the Spirit, who would talk directly to her soul and convert her. She ended up undergoing a trial and was later declared a heretic and banned from the colony. From Ann Hutchinson’s trial: Mrs. Hutchinson: How did Abraham know that it was God did bid him to offer his son, it being the breach of 6th commandment? Dept. Governor Dudley: By an immediate voice. Mrs. Hutchinson: So to me by an immediate voice. Dept. Governor Dudley: How? An immediate revelation? Mrs. Hutchinson: By the voice of His own Spirit to my soul. [ … ] focus of Puritanism was the deeply feeling of faith in one’s heart, thus, it’s a paradox. ▪ in 1637 → the Pequot tribe was being completely exterminated by the Puritans; ▪ in 1643 → the New England Confederacy was created between Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Haven and Plymouth, a military alliance that would last until 1684. ▪ in 1664 four Quakers were sentenced to death. ▪ 1691 → Plymouth is merged with the Massachusetts Bay Colony to form the Province of Mass Bay, to resist the encroachment (invasione) of Dutch, Spanish and French colonies. ▪ in 1692 the infamous Salem witch trials deeply stained New England's collective memory. French-born writer J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur emphasized and captured important aspects of late colonial society. In his 1782 book Letters from an American Farmer, he posed a resonant question: “What is an American?” – Crèvecœur offered his most explicit answer to this question in Letter III, where he described “the American” as a “new man, who acts upon new principles; he must therefore entertain new ideas and form new opinions.” We can diversify the case of Middle Colonies: Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Jersey, New York. ▪ in 1664 → Charles II granted the Duke of York ( future King James II ) New Holland and he conquered it without encountering any particular resistance, renaming New Amsterdam with “New York” and then sold a large part of the remaining New Holland to landowners who had already been granted the two Carolinas. From these the lands were soon ceded to the Quakers. ▪ in 1681 → Charles II granted Quaker William Penn a vast tract of land across the Delaware, which he would colonize and call Pennsylvania. Penn's philanthropy, embodied in the symbolic founding of the “city of brotherly love”, entailed a high degree of religious tolerance in the new colonies and the initial establishment of fair trade relations with the natives; by placing particularly favorable terms on land purchases, moreover, he attracted Protestant settlers from Holland, the various Germanic states, Switzerland, and Scotland. They transformed the central colonies into a true mosaic of languages and traditions. In the early decades of the 1700’s, the flow of migration to the English colonies of North America underwent a further boost → the widespread affluence in the new territories and reports of an endless supply of land represented a huge attraction. In fact, from Massachusetts to South Carolina, a pattern was emerging with some basic common features: ▪ a thriving economy based on trade and large plantations. ▪ an ideology increasingly focused on individualism but also on Protestant identity. ▪ an increasingly strong social division. The presence of such common elements, however, did not preclude some differences from coming to a head: the growing dependence of the Southern economy on the slave system, and the opposition to it of which the Quakers had made a principle, would have incalculable and lasting consequences. The government structure, common to almost all colonies, reproduced a substantial duplicity: a. the governor – appointed directly by the king (nominato direttamente dal re) – potentially held unlimited power, which was exercised with the support of a council that also served as the Upper House of Parliament. b. in fact, his powers were severely limited by his dependence, for the allocation of land, on a legislative assembly elected by a group of all adult males. Until the middle of the 18th century, the American colonies enjoyed all the advantages of having a protected market in England. British monopoly laws were based on the typical mercantilist ideal of economic self-sufficiency, whereby the colonies existed for the sole purpose of supply the mother-country with materials and offer manufacturing hands. ► their failure to implement them is one of the causes that gradually transformed the 13 States into a potentially self-sufficient system based on the dichotomy (rigid division into two parts) between_ 1. an industrial and commercial North 2. an agricultural South The extension of the migratory wave, and its movement toward the frontier, from Virginia to Connecticut, accentuated the clash (“l’urto”) not only with the native tribes, but also with the French, who had built a firm system of fortifications and trading stations from the mouths of the Mississippi to Ohio and Canada. The aggressiveness and expansionism of the colonists meant that the conflict gone down in history as the Seven Years War (1756 - 1763) had its beginnings and one of the main settings in America. The favorable conclusion of the conflict and the cession of Canada and all French possessions east of the Mississippi to England sparked the enthusiasm of the colonists, who had actively participated in the fighting with a partial spirit of unity. Their hunger for land and economic enterprise would later clash with the interests of the mother country, with potential conflict soon resulting in the birth of a nation. sense of divine things gradually increased, and became more and more lively, and had more of that inward sweetness. The appearance of every thing was altered; there seemed to be, as it were, a calm sweet cast, or appearance of divine glory, in almost every thing. God's excellency, his wisdom, his purity and love, seemed to appear in evory thing; in the sun, moon, and stars; in the clouds, and blue sky, in the grass, flowers, trees; in the water, and all nature; which used greatly to fix my mind. ... And scarce any thing, among all the works of nature, was so sweet to me as thunder and lightning; formerly, nothing had been so terrible to me. Before, I used to be uncommonly terrified with thunder, and to be struck with terror when I saw a thunder storm rising, but now, on the contrary, it rejoiced me. I felt God, so to speak, at the first appearance of a thunder storm … The delights which I now felt in the things of religion, wore of an exceeding different kind from those before mentioned, that I had when a boy; and what I then had no more notion of, than one born blind has of pleasant and beautiful colors. They were of a more inward, pure, soul animating and refreshing nature. Those former delights never reached the heart; and did not arise from any sight of the divine excellency of the things of God; or any taste of the soul satisfying and lifegiving good there is in them… My sense of divine things seemed gradually to increase, until I went to preach at New York, which was about a year and a half after they began; and while I was there, I felt them, very sensibly, in a much higher degree than I had done before. • focus on sense • sweetness in faith • importance of finding God in nature The Puritan CULTURE and MENTALITY The Bay Psalm Book was the first book to be ever printed in USA, which marks a significant moment in the country's literary history. This event took place in Massachusetts, specifically in Cambridge, in 1640. The importance of this publication was amplified by the profound influence of the Puritans, who resided in that region. In fact, Puritans took literacy and reading in great consideration, because of their belief in the importance of reading the Scriptures. American literature was, therefore, permeated with numerous biblical references that not only supported every assertion but also guided the narrative. This deeply rooted religious context influenced the very nature of the literature of that period, which primarily had an instructional purpose. ► didactic purpose: writers aimed to educate and instruct through examples of virtuous lives, reflecting their conception of history as the gradual realization of God's plan. According to Puritans → history is the gradual realization of God’s design. Puritans believed that God’s hand was present in every human event. For instance, if God looked favorably upon a nation, His approval could be evidenced in its success. No facts were to small or insignificant, everything could simbolize something. Therefore, they also thought a lot of the writing of history, as it was true evidence and unveiling (svelamento) of their collective certitudo salutis ► historiography played a crucial role in the “literary production” of their origins, especially the figure of Cotton Mather (Puritan minister, pastor and author): In 1702, he published Magnalia Christi Americana ► celebrates the myth of God’s chosen people, although, by the time it was written, the original Puritan community had already vanished. Mather saw himself as one of the last defenders of the “old New England way”, thus he proposed an example of life that would revitalize the spiritual energy of America, though it was by then more an ideal than an actual potential ► it was called “The Theory of Saints’ lives”, where the saints were the first settlers and divines of new England like William Bradford and John Winthrop. Why did Puritans emigrate from England? The formal answer is dissatisfaction within the established church (Church of England) → they thought it had failed to carry out the Reformation, and that it would be impossible to reform it from within. 1612 → Anne Bradstreet was born in Northampton, England, to a wealthy Puritan family. She was the apple of her father’s eye. Her father, Thomas Dudley, manager of the country estate of the Puritan earl of Lincoln, enabled his daughter to receive an education superior to that of most young women of the time, including training in the classics. As a young girl, Bradstreet wrote poems to please her father. At sixteen she married Simon Bradstreet, a recent graduate of Cambridge University, who worked with Thomas Dudley. She continued to write poetry after their marriage. In 1629 Simon was appointed to assist preparations of the Massachusetts Bay Company for John Winthrop’s journey to the New World. In 1630 the two families sailed with Winthrop’s fleet towards what would become the Boston settlement. ► Anne Bradstreet writes that when she first arrived to America, she “found a new world and new manners,” at which her “heart rose” in resistance. Her heart was rebelling, but was later persuaded by her deep feeling that it was God’s will, so she submitted and joined the church of God in Boston. But the wilderness was harsh, and it was said to make men stern and silent, children untruly and servants insolent. When she arrived to the New World, she had a very hard life → Bradstreet’s new circumstances posed many challenges and physical trials, harsh conditions and poor health. Even so, she eventually gave birth to eight children, with whom she was often left alone. ► Simon’s numerous diplomatic missions often kept him far from home, being him secretary to the company and later governor of the colony. Bradstreet’s poems circulated in manuscript until, without her knowledge, her brother-in-law John Woodbridge had them printed in London around 1650. In 1666, she lost most of her worldly possessions when her house burned down. She dies in 1672. Anne Bradstreet was the first woman to produce a sustained body of poetry in British North America. Writing was a privilege of men; women couldn’t overlook their duties of wives and mothers. Women often wouldn’t even want to initiate the process of publication of their writings because men had to promote or simply allow this to happen. In reality, women shared the New World’s hardships with men, as underlined by American literary critic Elaine Showalter. ► both men and women shared cold and hunger, faced disease and death, and risked captivity and massacre. Women had to do the hard physical labor of cooking, baking, cleaning, dairying, spinning (filatura), weaving (tessitura), sewing (cucitura), washing and ironing. They endured the dangers of childbirth in the wilderness, nursed babies and often buried them. This existential equality with men allowed Bradstreet’s self-expression. In Memory of My Dear Grandchild Elizabeth Bradstreet, Who Deceased August, 1665, Being a Year and a Half Old Farewell dear babe, my heart’s too much content, Farewell sweet babe, the pleasure of mine eye, Farewell fair flower that for a space was lent, Then ta’en away unto eternity. Blest babe, why should I once bewail thy fate, Or sigh thy days so soon were terminate, Sith thou art settled in an everlasting state. By nature trees do rot when they are grown, And plums and apples thoroughly ripe do fall, And corn and grass are in their season mown, And time brings down what is both strong and tall. But plants new set to be eradicate, And buds new blown to have so short a date, Is by His hand alone that guides nature and fate. Content Analysis The poem implies there’s a law of nature and there is a law of God, which is a contradiction for a Puritan, because they should be the same. But in this case she’s saying (implying her “rebellion”) that God is intervening in the natural order that he himself created. And she can’t understand why this is happening “why should I once bewail thy fate”, and that’s the beauty of Bradstreet’s poetry and the reason why we still read and appreciate it being her message so intimate and universal and comprehensible. ▪ it’s a calm, slow rhythm that reminds of a lullaby or maybe a prayer. ▪ decasyllabic poem with an iambic pentameter (unstressed + stressed). ▪ rhyme scheme → ABABCCC. ▪ farewell → anaphora ▪ content → noun. happiness, fulfilled ▪ for a space was lent → idea of God owning everything; “he was given to me for a little while”. ▪ sith → since ▪ by nature… strong and tall → everything answer to the laws of Nature, everything is born, grows, and eventually dies when it has completed its circle. ▪ but… eradicate → but when it happens that plants are eradicated when they’re just being planted; And buds… a date → and new blossoms die too soon. “To My Dear and Loving Husband” This is a love poem by Anne Bradstreet, and it’s about the sweet relationship between her and her husband. Their relation begins when she was a sixteen-year-old girl, so she grew up with him which influenced their intense connection. Her love is full of passion. If ever two were one, then surely we. If ever man were loved by wife, then thee; If ever wife was happy in a man, Compare with me, ye women, if you can. I prize thy love more than whole mines of gold Or all the riches that the East doth hold. My love is such that rivers cannot quench, Nor ought but love from thee, give recompense. Thy love is such I can no way repay, The heavens reward thee manifold, I pray. Then while we live, in love let’s so persevere That when we live no more, we may live ever. My aching head did break, From side to side for ease I toil, So faint I could not speak. Beclouded was my soul with fear Of Thy displeasure sore, Nor could I read my evidence Which oft I read before. “Hide not Thy face from me!” I cried, “From burnings keep my soul. Thou know’st my heart, and hast me tried; I on Thy mercies roll.” –– (eye rhyme) “O heal my soul,” Thou know’st I said, “Though flesh consume to nought,1 What though in dust it shall be laid, To glory ’t shall be brought.” Thou heard’st, Thy rod Thou didst remove And spared my body frail, Thou show’st to me Thy tender love, My heart no more might quail. O, praises to my mighty God, Praise to my Lord, I say, Who hath redeemed my soul from pit, Praises to Him for aye. FORM AND STRUCTURE ▪ the metric line is an iambic tetrameter ▪ rhyme scheme is composed by alternating rhymes (rima alternata) ABAB, but with some exceptions, such as: ✓ second stanza: boil, break, toil, speak → eye rhyme – a word that rhymes only for the way it is written. ✓ third stanza: fear, sore, evidence, before → could be an eye rhyme, or could be the a more complicated mechanism, like the last stanza, where God, say, pit, aye is not a rhyme as Bradstreet wanted to highlight distance between God and Hell. The author is talking about being overwhelmed with fear and anguish, as the doubt of being damned by God devours her, but the word evidence indicates the opposite, which is salvation, a proof of being among the elect. This desperation state was the nightmare of Thomas Hooker → he thought – and pointed out in his writings in theology – that there was a risk in the way Puritans were dealing with their relationship with God → not having any mediator and relying only on themselves and their self - examination could bring believers into despair, or as Thomas Hooker called it, “a holy desperation”, one that came from the excessive desire of people to read the signs, to be saved, to become one with God. In order to solve this problem, Thomas Hooker wrote that one can prepare by learning to recognize the signs of God’s favor. So, when Bradstreet writes Beclouded was my soul with fear Of Thy displeasure sore, she’s referring to that. ► This is why, probably, fear and evidence are opposites like God and pit. ✓ fourth stanza: cried, soul, tried, roll → imperfect rhyme. ▪ last stanza: line 10: “thy” is the archaic form of “your” ▪ line 18: “nought” is the archaic form of “nothing” ▪ this poem is divisible in five parts: 1. introduction of the event, a narrative register is used (lines: 1-8) 2. she’s stricken by the fever and starts feeling afraid of the fact she might have lost God’s favor (lines: 9-12); 3. direct speech tending towards the dramatic, like a theatrical work (lines: 13-20) 4. God’s intervention (lines: 21-24); 5. author asking for grace (lines: 25-28). CONTENT Deliverance (liberation, release) is the main theme of the poem. It’s a very simple and short poem, so that the reader can understand the pain of being afflicted with this terrible illness and wonders whether the cause of this terrible sickness is really because God is angry or displeased with the poetess. ▪ begirt → surrounded ▪ no part was found → no part was found (that was free of pain) ▪ rid me out → cleansed, cleared, purified ▪ From… toil → she’s struggling trying to find a side upon which she doesn’t feel pain ▪ Beclouded… fear → my soul was overshadowed, obscured with fear [note the use of inversions: “my soul was beclouded with fear”, used for metric purpose] ▪ Of… sore → (fear of) God’s severe displeasure ▪ Nor… before → she could read evidences of her salvation but now she can’t anymore ▪ hast me tried → you tested me (direct apostrophe to God) ▪ roll → long for, desire ▪ Though… nought → although my body will turn into nothing ▪ Thou… remove → you heard me and stopped tormenting me ▪ My… quail → (so that) my heart can lament no longer ▪ aye → eve Many Puritan elements can be traced down the whole poem, such as: ✓ “flesh” (carne, word used in the Bible), vv. 3, 18 ✓ “evidence”, as a sign of God, v.11 ✓ “pit” indicates hell, v. 27. 1642-1729 → as Bradstreet, Edward Taylor was born in the United Kingdom before migrating to the America. He was a true PURITAN POET and a Minister of the church, a clergy man. The Church of England imposed people through the Act of Supremacy to take an oath, which he rebelled against, so he had to leave. He first of all went to a College and studied Divinity (teology). Around 1671, he became Minister and a physician in the frontier town of Westfield, after King Philip’s war, where he settles for the rest of his life. He was very orthodox → he wanted to defend the New England Way which was slowly fading away; he fought against people who wanted to become more loose and liberal. He learned Latin, Hebrew and Greek because he wanted to read the Scriptures in the original language. Once married, he had fourteen children and owned a huge library in the house. He read Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, religious histories, natural sciences. PECULIAR PUBLICATION HISTORY His poetry was known only by a select circle in his own day. It was passed down in manuscript through his family for generations, until his great-grandson donated the manuscript to the Beinecke library, at Yale University, in 1883, to be found five decades later by Thomas H. Johnson. Taylor’s lack of print publication in his lifetime did not mean that he thought his work unworthy. Manuscript publication was a habit (common practice) → it was a popular medium for coterie poetry, or poems shared exclusively with a small group of associates. The most eminent coterie poets may be George Herbert and John Donne, an Anglican minister whom many regard as the leading poet of Metaphysical poetry → an intellectual style that influenced Taylor, who reflects this influence in his poetry by using wit, conveying the image of brilliance and linking very different domains together with paradoxes and metaphors. A key instrument he uses is conceit → an extended metaphor developed throughout a whole poem. HIS MAIN WORK ▪ Preparatory meditation (full title: Preparatory meditations before my approach to the Lord’s Supper) → reflections on the doctrine preached upon the day of administration; ► he would read some lines from the Bible, preach upon them and then gave communion; Taylor would focus on his daily sermon and then write a poem out of his reflections. ▪ God’s Determinations Touching his Elect: a long poem in the tradition of the medieval debate, describing God’s ways in converting the predestined elects (the chosen ones) to Christianity and the spiritual joys of receiving grace. ▪ Single poems (personal lyrics, elegies for public figures) - Huswifery → typical metaphysical poem. - Upon a Wasp chilled with cold → typically combines Puritans’ new attention to naturalistic details with spiritual details. THE FLEA, John Donne. a poem that embodies metaphysical poetry. The poem shows a perfect example of conceit, as the author is hinting a thing using a totally different image → we see a young man trying to persuade his lover to sleep with him – it was said that two people exchanged bodily fluids during sexual intercourses, and the author uses the image of a flea to minimize this. 1ST STANZA Mark but this flea, and mark in this, How little that which thou deniest me is; It sucked me first, and now sucks thee, concerning the Lord’s supper, in which he used a quotation from the New Testament: “How could you come to this wedding not wearing a wedding garment?” PURITAN IDEAS WE CAN FIND IN THE POEM: ▪ He asks God to make something of him and he’s using the analogy of creating a dress to become a Visible Saint, he’s asking for spiritual formation in order to be a good Christian and believer, to be saved and answer to God’s call, obeying his orders and following his designs. ▪ he’s talking directly to God, which underlines the idea of a direct relationship between God and believer. ▪ The initiative always stands on God’s side as you can’t do anything to win his mercy; he’s invoking God’s action and asking him to use everything of him for his designs. ▪ He sees God in everyday life and activities such as spinning, which is a very puritan point of view → spinning / weaving, common in colonial new England, is an analogy for spiritual preparation. Making cloth is compared to a spiritual practice, the poem is a prayer asking for god’s help in a process of spiritual transformation. ▪ Another image from the scriptures is perhaps implied, as the believer is seen as a bride wedded to Jesus Christ (book of revelation, parables, Paul’s letters) – MATRIMONIO MISTICO MODULO B Contesto storico. The Norton Anthology (1820-1865) + appunti lezioni + slides. The 19th century is the era of the territorial expansion of the US towards the West of the continent. The expansion was accompanied by the ideology of the Manifest Destiny, an expression coined by newspaper editor John O’Sullivan in 2 essays of 1839 and 1845, in which he claimed that it was the US’s right to annex the Republic of Texas because it was “by the right of our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self-government entrusted to us”. It was in fact believed that Divine Providence had destined the US to control the whole American continent through the conquest of minority populations such as the Natives and the Mexicans in order to spread the ideal of democratic institutions. At first, we couldn’t talk about American exceptionalism, but at this point of history it wouldn’t be totally wrong, as they didn’t repudiate expansionism even if it had bad consequences on natives, such as appropriation of indigenous land and more. What happened that helped the birth of this country and its culture? The phenomenon of moving westward and covering more and more lands. They began with the initial 13 States and started to acquire more and more parts of the continent from East to the West coast through many ways: ▪ diplomatic way → the purchase of Louisiana (1803) happened when a huge piece (nearly one third of the territory) was sold at a price of 15 million dollars to Thomas Jefferson, who bought it from Napoleon’s war debts. ▪ military way → (1) Second American War of Independence (The War of 1812), with the Battle of New Orleans which helped creating the anthem “The Star-Spangled Banner” patriotic myth of Uncle Sam, a man providing means and supplies for the troupes; moreover, Texas wanted independence but had a part of Mexico, which brought the States to attack and led to the first tensions between North and South. ► In 1815 → the extraordinary military success of Andrew Jackson at New Orleans seals the US victory. It’s the birth of the myth of the “democratic hero”, the self-made man of humble origins, the pragmatic hero, who mistrusts a too sophisticated and aristocratic culture. (2) → 1846-48: the Mexican War, as in 1845, after Mexico has abolished slavery on its territory, the US annex the newly self-declared “republic of Texas”, with the votes of Texans and of the Congress. The war demonstrates evident US superiority and in 1848, with the treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, Mexico yields California and New Mexico (half of its territory) to the US and acknowledges the new boundary with Texas along the Rio Grande (the lost territory corresponded basically to the entire South-West → the present states of Texas, California, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, and parts of New Mexico, Colorado e Wyoming. ▪ migrations - first reason → people were hungry for lands that they could cultivate, so they used the “Oregon Trail” – 3.200 km – that extended from Independence [Missouri] to the region of the Columbia river, which was said to be very fertile. - second reason → religious, as Mormons were persecuted in new England, which led them to move (the “Mormon Trail”) to Utah and occupy Salt Lake Valley, where they reclaimed the land (*bonificato). - third reason → economic reason grew when gold was found by James W. Marshall at Sutter's Mill, the “California Gold Rush” trail attracted people. Lincoln issued an act called the Homestead Act which granted land to every individual who would go West and start taking care of the land. You had to be younger than 40 and occupy the territory for at least a few years, and then you became the righteous owner. ► Of course, this helped strengthening the myth of the self-made man, as in England no one could do that and people were fighting for land since the beginning of time, and farmers did in fact not own the land they worked on. Talking about infrastructures, Americans progresses in this field too as: ▪ in 1825 the Eire Channel is opened, connecting the Great Lakes area with the Atlantic Ocean by way of the Hudson River, through New York. ▪ In 1869 the Transcontinental Railroad line is completed with the welding of the two lines of the Union Pacific Railroad (from the East) & of the Central Pacific Railroad (from the West, California) at Promontory Point, Utah. The American progress is moving westward guiding English people, while the natives are running away from them along with buffalos. She’s probably holding a Bible in one hand, while with her other hand she’s carrying the telegraph poles. Mountains represent the wilderness and a train is following, as a symbol of modernity, marking the opposition between wilderness and the civilization that white men are bringing. She seemingly represents Justice. The Civil war 1861-1865 In 1850 the Fugitive Slave Act required slaves to return to their owners, even if they were in a free state; that was imposed even in Boston. In 1859 John Brown’s raid at Harpers Ferry, in Virginia, took place → it led 21 men in an attempt to found a free black (abolitionist) republic in the federal armory of Harpers Ferry. The raid held out for two days and was finally defeated by commander Robert Lee. ► Many of Brown’s men were killed, including two of his sons, and he was captured and sentenced to death. The Civil war was fought between the Confederation (Southern Confederate States) & the Union (Northern States of the Union) in the years between 1861 and 1865 → Slavery was abolished in the South. After the war the entire Economy was deprived of its basis and therefore had to recreate itself. The period right after the War is called the Reconstruction: the US went through an enormous crisis and had to start again almost from scratch. Abraham Lincoln, with anti-slavery inclinations, is elected President of the US in 1860, with a second mandate in 1864. On January 1st, 1863, Lincoln in fact proclaims the emancipation of slaves. On April 14th, 1965 Lincoln is assassinated by a fanatic Southerner actor (John Wilkes Booth) at Ford’s theatre in Washington, D.C. Whitman will write his Lincoln Elegy & the great “When Lilacs Last in The Door-yard Bloom’d”. THE FRONTIER THESIS – (also called “Turner Thesis”) dark and gloomy: beauty should be light and delicate; the great ought to be solid, and even massive. They are indeed ideas of a very different nature, one being founded on pain, the other on pleasure” (part 3, section 27) Sublime is not produced by a positive attitude of contemplation, as in the case of the appreciation of Beauty, but by the perception of one’s own insufficiency in front of an overwhelming manifestation → discrepancy between the subject and the object. “Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible… or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime” The sublime is the horrendous that fascinates: an oxymoron. There is an antithetic interpretation of nature in American culture, which can be explained as: a. Wilderness, as a where the wild and the civilized cannot be combined; wilderness is the land before men, completely untouched and in need of civilization, which was the mission they had. It has a sacramental value as it promises and offers an opportunity for new life and the possibility to start again, almost as if men were never sent away from Eden. b. Pastoral, where the poet flees from a city and its messiness to find shelter and peace in the country, where he stays for a determined period before going back to town. Nature is seen as bucolic, with the idea tracing back to Classic literature. Authors such as Irving, Cooper, and Bryant placed a special emphasis on the importance of the natural landscape for the development of national character, finding in the relatively unspoiled vast lands of the continent a nurturing ground for the spiritual growth of a nation that, they sometimes suggested, could possibly emerge as “better” than any of those of long-settled Europe. ► These writers shared the vision of the popular Hudson River landscape painters of the antebellum period, like Thomas Cole and Asher Durand, who regularly portrayed individuals dwarfed by mountains and forests in a vast and unsettled nature where God’s spirit could be apprehended. The Hudson River School was a mid-19th-century – it developed from approximately 1825 to 1875 – American art movement embodied by a group of landscape painters, who were trying to define and represent the American landscapes, along with creating a new style. It is regarded as America’s first true movement in American art, a school of an ever-evolving fraternity of painters who helped shape the dominant vision of the American landscape. Along with contemporary writers and poets, they hoped to define a particularly “American” voice via an intensive artistic and literary exploration of Nature. ► These landscape painters celebrated the glorious lands of the Hudson River Valley and beyond, forging a unique vision of the vast potential of a country in the process of identifying itself. The first paintings are much closer to a European taste, and they mostly represent the West: The painting represents Cole and Bryant, the most famous painter and most famous poet of the time. Their taste and ideas clearly were alike. In the painting men are much smaller than nature, but the landscape is divided in two: the left side is darker, while the right one is full of light. On the right side there are telegraph poles, steamboats, and roads. On the left there is a group of natives watching white people bringing colonization and modernity. The English are slowly turning into Americans as they conquer land and fight wilderness. The left side represents the sublime, terrifying and dark nature which is frightening. These enormous waterfalls clearly make men feel small and defenseless. Church will redo this painting, but it will be less realistic and more communicating through masses of colors. Americans at first feel able to reconcile civilization and wilderness, but as they explore more and more of the West, they start to fear that they can’t. Some painters even represent native tribes and their lives. At the end of the XIX century Americans start to realize that their actions are destroying and ruining America and the landscapes. The European Gaze. ▪ Alexis de Tocqueville Quinze jours au désert → idea of destruction, intimation of an upcoming and inevitable change that has given the solitudes of this America their striking originality and such touching beauty. The idea of this natural and wild grandeur mixes with the wonderful visions that the triumphant progress of civilization inspires. ► We feel proud to be human beings, and, at the same time, we have some kind of bitter regret about the power over nature that God has given us. Evidence of the American sublime and the American view of facts. ▪ Walt Whitman, Specimen Days → he criticizes the ones who praise Europe for their ruins, when one should visit the West and America in general, which is full of different and boundless landscapes. He describes farms as “democratic” and has the idea that everything which is American is democratic. The Europeans who never got to see the beauty and power New World’s nature will never understand the new and better literature, Dante has never seen these places, so according to him his art is missing a piece. These landscapes will create broad, patriotic, and heroic minds. Nature is freeing and nourishing for the soul. ▪ Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas → the idea of individualism is fundamental, but the mass character must be controlled and kept in mind because only by doing so we can ensure the possibility of the individual to express itself. ▪ Henry David Thoreau, Walking → comparison between European and American nature. He says that in Europe and in European literature there is no authentic nature, the concept of nature can only be understood after seeing American wilderness. We can only protect the world by preserving this wilderness, which is the root of all new ideas. In Europe, literature does not breathe new and fresh air, it’s missing true nature. He says that the ideal of American freedom is simply becoming a myth, and future poems will be inspired by American mythology and not American reality. ▪ Joseph Brodsky, On grief and reason → this is a later work, talking about nature in Frost’s poetry and quoting an essay by Auden, who says that when a European wants to confront nature he goes for an evening stroll (depicting an ideal and comforting landscape, full of history) and stops under a tree where probably many kings have rested, before going back to his house completely unchanged. On the contrary, in America, man and tree are free of references, they are devoid of intrinsic meaning, and face each other in all their primal power. It is yet to be decided who’s the strongest being between them, there are no set rules. American Literary Nationalism, before 1820. ▪ Charles Brockden Brown → he is said to be the father of the American novel, who finally uses American materials and history even though he still follows the English gothic style. He wants to prove that America can be the muse for those who want to depict moral values in their art, even though these values are different from the ones most famous in Europe. He’s the first to produce an “American literature” out of the treatment of American materials, as he was interested in American history, he chose to use “incidents of Indian hostility, and the perils of the western wilderness”. American Literary Nationalism, the 1820’s. During the 1820’s we see the first flourishing of the literary production. Authors are less radically patriotic and more doubtful about the potential of the new nation, they still look to European literature as a partial model and a culture with which they feel they are in some form of continuity. ▪ Washington Irving, The sketch book of Geoffrey Crayon → it’s the diary of an imaginary writer. He created the first short stories of American literature, the most famous ones are “The legend of Sleepy Hollow '' and “Rip Van Winkle” – the name’s Dutch since the first colonization was from Holland – whose story tells the adventure of a man who drinks almost an entire bottle of wine for a game and when he sobers up he realizes something has happened: his house is rusty and empty and he doesn’t recognize his neighbors. He then understands he had slept for 20 years and had woken up in the US, which he realizes didn’t change much of his life. Irving is criticizing American heroism: for normal people, nothing has changed even with the War of Independence, their lives normally went on. “America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination.” W. Whitman, Preface to Leaves: “the geography of the continent, the physical reality of the US is in itself a poem” The movement originated in New England in the early years of the 19th century and firmly developed in the twenty years between the publication of Nature (its manifesto) and Walden. Emerson was accused to be confused because of his doctrine of transcendentalism, as it was believed to be too difficult to understand. In “Nature”, Emerson formulated its principles and divulged those through essays and through the Dial → the journal of the transcendentalist. The Transcendental Club held meetings in Boston and Concord for four years (1836-1840). ► Members were Emerson, Thoreau, Bronson Alcott (Louisa May Alcott’s father), Ripley, Brownson, Parker, Ellery Channing, Peabody and Margaret Fuller → 1st woman-foreign- correspondent on a US newspaper & author of an important proto-feminist manifesto, “Woman in the Nineteenth Century”. What gives Fuller’s “Preface” originality and impact is her insisting that individualism and liberty are indivisible. She links the cause of female emancipation to the abolition of slavery and attacks all those who would try to reduce people to property, black or female. She says that what women need is not a woman to act or rule, but a nature to grow, an intellect to discern and a soul to live freely. They also experienced communal life from 1841 to 1847 on a farm in Roxbury, called Brooke Farm. The community was funded by Ripley and the Transcendental Club and they would experiment in self- subsistence based on the cooperative model of agricultural, artisanal and scholastic work. The organic principle of art Matthiessen’s idea of aesthetic is founded in the organic principle in art. He wanted to show Emerson and other authors were influenced by their ideas of aesthetic. For instance, Emerson’s believed that all great art (literature, painting, sculpture...) is an organic expression, because, as a living organism would do, it develops a mode that is unitary, whole, spontaneous and necessary. This biological analogy originated in Plato and Aristotle and was rediscovered during the years of Romanticism. Following Coleridge and Schlegel, in “Journals” Emerson distinguished a mechanical and organic creation → he says the difference between the two is that the mechanical construction is like a carpenter building a box, and the organic creation is like a mother giving birth: in the first example, the box exists in the mind of the carpenter, whereas the child doesn’t come exclusively from the parents’ mind, but some higher and eternal power. The goal of expression is to fully realize and express the intuition, and to make this possible, the poet needs to be trained in his art’s craft. ► The content’s FORM must be chosen by the poet and must be alive and inseparable from the content itself. Emerson, in fact, anticipated Croce’s idea of poetry being non - analyzable, because of the impossibility of separating the form from the content. We can measure the degree of inspiration by the degree of necessity in the expression → ideally, this necessity should be absolute, down to the level of the single word. It’s important to distinguish between the genius and talent: ▪ genius is Deity, the inspiration at work in the intellect → genius looks to the ultimate cause, proceeds from interior to exterior, it educates and has a didactic purpose. ▪ talent is when the intellect wants to be something by itself, without being the agent of the divine → talent simply entertains, it’s mundane. From all of this, Matthiessen derives the features of American renaissance: ▪ metaphysical tension → they kept, form the 17th century, their eyes fixed on the supernatural. ▪ functional style → plain style, simple communication, truth as it is. ▪ focus on the relationship between individual and society, between nature of good and evil ▪ organic principle in art, meaning that art is generated in the same way as a living organism is born → by a way of internal necessity ▪ aim of persuasion → emotional and intellectual hold on the reader ▪ emphasis on the sight as a metaphor for the ability to see spiritual things ▪ symbols as mode of expression ▪ no separation between art and other functions of society (ex. met in Brooke Farm) Matthiessen’s theory of the American Renaissance has been extremely influential, but in the last decades it has also been revised, although it is still employed as useful. The main criticism was: ▪ it excluded the important contribution of women and of minorities, especially the Afro- Americans. ▪ it showed little interest in literature produced outside Massachusetts (Boston & New York). ▪ it privileged the great literary influences – such as that of Shakespeare, Milton, Scott, etc. – but omitted any discussion of the crucial issues such as slavery, immigration, etc. ▪ it exaggerated the separation between American literature and English literature → in fact, the writers on both sides of the Atlantic were writing in the same language and reading each other. H.H Waggoner speaks about Emerson’s centrality in American poetry and says that focusing on Emerson sheds more light on the issue of what’s American about American poetry: a. it’s more concerned with nature than with society or culture; b. it’s more concerned with the eternal than with the temporal; c. American poets have generally taken a superior attitude toward the traditions and they have turned inherited poetic forms and traditional genres to their own purposes or abandoned them completely. The Age of Reform The age of reform is central to the literary movement of the “American Renaissance”, especially in the 1840s. This is because of: ▪ the cultural heritage of the Enlightenment, with its faith in reason, in the goodness of man, and in human progress → its liberalism and defense of liberties. ▪ the feeling that was spreading among these intellectuals that American culture and literature were not realizing their progressive and democratic aspirations. The Age of Reform was a reaction against the emerging powers of capitalism, with its ruthless exploitation of natural and human resources: in a few years – between 1850 and 1865, with the building of the infrastructures – the country will turn from an agrarian into an industrial economy. The liberal causes were: o antislavery o women’s vote (1848: 1st women’s rights convention at Seneca Falls) o temperance cause → against alcoholism; women “fought” too, and is thought that it wouldn't have been successfull if it wasn't for them. o opposition to the genocide of the Native Americans – the trail of tears: the removal of 5'000 Cherokee from their territories – and the expansionism into Mexican territory Recognizing the centrality of reform to his cultural moment, Emerson began to link himself to activist reform movements. In “Emancipation in the West Indies”, for example, he encouraged to take a larger role in opposing slavery, firmly committed to antislavery reform up to the time of the Civil War. He also offered occasional remarks on the value of temperance. Emerson’s belief in individuality led naturally not only to a commitment to democratic equality, but to a conviction that life was process. The self is placed at the centre of Emerson’s poems and is shown, poem after poem, recreating the world and transforming it into something freshly seen. ► He always stayed loyal to the idea that every person had the power to shape and change things, and that’s one of the reasons why he played an active role during the reforms against slavery. In 1855 he addressed a women’s rights convention in support of women’s suffrage, which he would continue to endorse. Emersonian reform also had literary implications. The danger posed by patriarchal power was a central theme of both anti-slavery and temperance reform. When the Fugitive Slave Act was enforced in Boston – by Melville’s father-in-law, Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw –, escaping slaves had to return to their Southern masters, which brought Thoureau to write his famous speech, “Slavery in Massachusetts” delivered at a Fourth of July counter ceremony at which a copy of the Constitution was burned. In that speech he summed up the disillusionment that many of his generation shared, presenting Massachusetts as a type of hell. More obliquely than Thoreau, Melville explored slavery in “Benito Cereno” as an index to the white supremacism that he regarded as a stain on the national character. With the outbreak of the Civil War, major writers of the period thought the war to be a holy war against slavery that might fulfill the promises of the principles of the Declaration of Independence itself. ► The idea of the United States as an exceptional nation because it had been set aside for an exceptional destiny proved almost impossible to overcome, even in moments when the country marched into bloody internal conflict → manifest destiny. The Concept Of “Small And Large World” For American Writers They considered the world to be small because they knew each other and could write to one another very easily. They lived in a very small area and were close to one another, so they still felt the influence of European literature and vice versa. They also considered the world to be large as many writers traveled to Europe and reported their impressions in their works (Irving, Cooper, Fuller, Hawthorne, Poe, Emerson, Douglass, Melville); they were influenced by the classics, by Greek and Roman mythology, by Indian and Asian religions, by English literature and by the Bible. On the other hand, though, they were trying to Several themes are treated: o the existence and nature of the human soul, described as immortal, immensely vast, and beautiful. o the relationship between the soul and the personal ego → our conscious ego is limited in comparison to the soul, despite the fact that we often mistake our ego for our true self. o the relationship of one human soul to another → at some level, the souls of all people are connected, but the precise degree of this connection is not spelled out. o the relationship of the human soul to God → the essay does not seem to explicitly disagree with the traditional Western idea that the soul is created by and has an existence that is similar to God, or rather God exists within us, but it’s clear that it was influenced by Eastern religions and classic theories, deriving from the works of Plato and Neoplatonists – all of whose writings Emerson read extensively throughout his career. ▪ Compensation (1841) → claims that if the Oversoul is omnipotent and at the same time good, then evil does not and cannot exist. ► This shows his monism (the universe is ruled by one principle, “good”) and optimism. According to these principles of monism and optimism, every temporary unbalance is corrected by compensation, meaning that for every bad deed corresponded a good deed, to every achieved objective there corresponds a loss; even if the individual can just see a partial thing and can’t know inside himself the total action of this principle → the universe is bound for the good. In 1842 → Emerson loses his 5-year son, Waldo. He will never recover from this loss and will eventually turn toward a more skeptical attitude in “Experience”. We experience an anticlimax in his poetry, as he accepts that the world does not always appear promising, but fragmented instead. Not everything could be summed up through the principles he had theorized and it’s hard if not impossible to find an absolute meaning to nature and the universe. “Illusion, Temperament, Succession, Surface, Surprise, Reality, Subjectiveness – these are the threads on the loom of time, these are the lords of life.” “I am a fragment, and this is a fragment of me” Through time, Emerson became more and more involved in the period’s struggle for social reform, especially for anti-slavery and women rights. His main works on such topics are: o Essays, 1st Series (1841) o Essays 2nd Series (1844) o Representative Men, on exemplary figures such as Shakespeare, Napoleon, Swedenborg. o The Conduction of Life, on the tension between individual thought and the external constricting world. o Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks (posthumous, late 19th century) By “Nature”, Emerson means both the natural world, as in human beings and living things, and reality as opposed to the subject, what the mind perceives as “outside our own bodies”, the “not - me”. Thus, in writing an essay on nature, he tries to give an explanation of the world. ► This explanation is grounded on the idealistic philosophical tradition, Kantian and pre- Kantian (i.e., Platonic and Neoplatonic). It considers the spiritual as the ultimate reality, and nature as the place for the Spirit (or God, or Oversoul, or unitary divine principle)’s revelation. The argumentation is founded on self-evidence (no logical meaning or rational reflection). The method he uses to interpretate nature is analogy, which comes down from the Puritans’ habit of typology. The structure of the essay follows the ascending uses that man can make of nature, from material to spiritual ones – such as Commodity, to Beauty, to Language, to Discipline and the doctrine of Idealism, which lets us see Nature as the space and means of God’s revelation. Among the uses of nature that a man can make, there’s the use of language → Nature allows us to exercise the most basic functioning of the human mind: reasoning, understanding and perceiving God in nature, and suggests men words of their language, through which the Spirit may come to consciousness. Merton M. Sealts and Alfred R. Ferguson, in their essay Nature: Origin, Growth, Meaning, focus on the main problem with Nature → the starting point is that this is a difficult essay, and it’s so complicated to understand because it’s not clear how one should read it. It’s impossible to determine how to approach a text that one does not know whether it is a scientific, philosophical, doctrinal, mystical, or even poetic essay. ► actually, Nature is a bit of all these things together; it is a HYBRID NATURE, which accounts for its characteristic and typically Emersonian prose: 1. non-systematic → Emerson constructs sentences, but not theories; 2. often contradictory → though, Emerson turns contradictions into a source of strength. 3. repetitive → Emerson repeats the same concept several times, reformulating the idea. Hence, his pros) has a non-linear development that it may appear confusing. On the other hand, Emerson’s prose excels in the features that make it literary (in an oratory style) and even similar to poetry: 1. the lapidary statements – almost aphorisms – that are imprinted in the mind and become famous → “I am a transparent eyeball”. 2. the incisive, memorable formulations → “our age is retrospective”; 3. the repetitions with variations; 4. the reformulation of the same concepts; 5. the lyrical passages → dense with figures of meaning and figures of sound like alliterations, “In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befal me in life – no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground, – my head bathed by the blithe air,1 and uplifted into infinite space, – all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball. I am nothing. I see all. The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.” 6. the hortatory tone; 7. the references to personal experience. Alan D. Hodder, Emerson’s Rhetoric of Revelation: «Nature», the Reader, and the Apocalypse Within, UPenn Press, 1990 The structure of Nature apparently suggests the idea of a rational discourse: ▪ it is “neatly arranged in headings and subheadings”; ▪ it is rigorously organized in eight chapters, “arranged sequentially according to one overarching scheme, with an ‘Introduction’ that formulates the initiating question and a final chapter that provides its resolution”; ▪ the principle organizing this sequential arrangement is an ascending scale of man’s uses of nature, from the lowest to the highest (Neoplatonism); ▪ each chapter – but explicitly Beauty, Language, Discipline and Idealism – further divides the use of nature, illustrating various parts of human personality: senses, body, intellect, conscience, reason. Nature’s rhetorical models: a. the philosophic or scientific treatise, which was the model as well for Emerson’s lecturing tour on natural sciences of 1833-34; b. the sermons, which were designed to ignite the listeners’ faith; from the origins of New England, they also engaged and satisfied the reason; although they had lost their classical organization into four parts (biblical text, context, doctrine and uses) they kept their emphasis on rational demonstration and argumentative proof. Emerson’s prose, though, was criticized for its redundancy, incoherence – as in contradictions – and lack of a logical articulation, due to fragmentation and disjointedness; all qualities that seem to point to faults in the discursive faculty. Features of Emerson’s prose: ▪ an ability to give the illusion of forward momentum while all along it is really coursing back on itself. ▪ it is not in fact an argument built upon steps and corollaries → it’s variations upon a theme. ▪ its governing figure is not the line —as it should be in logical exposition— but the circle (see quotes from his fundamental essay «Circles»). ▪ it confounds the reader’s expectations from a linear treatment: sequence, logical progression, justification and conclusion → links and transitions are often specious. ▪ its typical rhetorical move is not sequence but repetition → often paragraphs turn out to be a mere catalogue or series of restatements and substitutions. ▪ the independent constituents of this prose are arranged in a kind of “discontinuous adjacency” whose rhetoric is not that of philosophical demonstration, but that of repetition, re-creation and substitution. ▪ each moment is presented to the reader just as it was seen by the narrator → their relation, as it was perceptibly in nature, is one of parts to the whole—not items in a sequence. ► the effect is to heighten the vividness and intensity of each moment of presentation, to center attention on the semantic content, to reveal pure significance Quotes by Circles “The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary picture is repeated without end. It is the highest emblem in the cipher of the world. St. Augustine described the nature of God as a circle whose centre was everywhere and its circumference nowhere.” “Another analogy we shall now trace, that every action admits of being outdone. Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning.” "The universe is fluid and volatile… Permanence is but a word of degrees. Our globe seen by God is a transparent law, not a mass of facts. The law dissolves the fact and holds it fluid. “Thus, there is no sleep, no pause, no preservation, but all things renew, germinate and spring. Why should we import rags and relics into the new hour?” Quotes Under the general name of Commodity, I rank all those advantages which our senses owe to nature. Nature, in its ministry to man, is not only the material, but is also the process and the result → the wind sows the seed, the sun evaporated the sea… the rain feeds the plant, the plant feeds the animal… etc. Chapter three. Beauty. 2nd use of Nature is Beauty → satisfying a higher need of man, the love of Beauty. It’s a Neoplatonic vision, from material to spiritual needs. ▪ nature is order (from the Greek “cosmos”) → harmony of composition, beauty; the ancient Greeks called the world kosmos, beauty. Such is the constitution of all things, or such the plastic power of the human eye, that the primary forms, as the sky, the mountain, the tree, the animal, give us a delight in and for themselves; a pleasure arising from outline, color, motion, and grouping. ▪ this perception is partly the work of the human eye, partly of light, which emanates from things and makes them beautiful. this seems partly owing to the eye itself. The eye is the best of artists, and as the eye is the best composer, so light is the first of painters. There is no object so foul that intense light will not make beautiful. ► aesthetic theory of Aquinas – and later of Dante and of Stephen Dedalus in Joyce’s Portrait – according to which claritas is one of the attributes of divine beauty in all things; the aesthetic experience is the apprehension of the final cause (the Being, God), who manifests himself through the unity, integrity and radiance of all things. Beauty has three major aspects: 1. material → “the simple perception of natural forms is a delight” 2. spiritual/moral → “the presence of a higher, namely, of the spiritual element is essential to its [= of Beauty] perfection. The high and divine beauty which can be loved without effeminacy, is that which is found in combination with the human will. ► Beauty is the mark God sets upon virtue; the Beautiful is good and moral 3. intellectual/cognitive → “there is still another aspect under which the beauty of the world may be viewed, namely, as it becomes an object of the intellect. Beside the relation of things to virtue, they have a relation to thought. The intellect searches out the absolute order of things as they stand in the mind of God. ► the apprehension of Beauty provides insights into God’s design of the world. We must distinguish between “taste” and “art”. ► all men are in some degree impressed by the face of the world; some men even to delight. This love of beauty is Taste. Others have the same love in such excess, that, not content with admiring, they seek to embody it in new forms. The creation of beauty is Art. ▪ Art is a nature passed through the alembic of man and in art, nature works through the will of a man filled with the beauty of her first works. We are presented with a Platonic conception of Beauty. “Beauty, in its largest and profoundest sense, is one expression for the universe. God is the all-fair. Truth, and goodness, and beauty, are but different faces of the same All.” “But beauty in nature is not ultimate. It is the herald of inner and eternal beauty” → Emerson proceeds to the subsequent degree of abstraction, idealization, spiritualization, through the use of Language. Chapter four. Language. 3rd use of Nature is Language → “nature is the vehicle of thought, in a simple, double, and threefold degree”. Nature gives us language, language comes from Nature. ▪ “Words are signs of natural facts” → every word which is used to express a moral or intellectual fact, if traced to its root, is found to be borrowed from some material appearance. ► right means straight; wrong means twisted; spirit primarily means wind; transgression is the crossing of a line; supercilious indicates the raising of the eyebrow; we say heart to express emotion while the head denotes thought, and thought and emotion are borrowed from sensible things, now appropriated to spiritual nature. The origin of language is figurative. Natural fact (phenomenon) → image (sign) → word. ▪ “Particular natural facts are symbols of particular spiritual facts” → this is an example of reformulation of a previous thought. Every appearance in nature corresponds to some state of the mind, and that state of the mind can only be described by presenting that natural appearance as its picture.” Not only words but things in themselves allude to the revelation of a moral meaning. There’s a correspondence (= similar to a puritan concept) that links everything existing in nature to an idea that is in us, and the only way to express it is by using that image. If we have the idea of cunningness inside, we must use the image that nature gives us of the fox. Natural facts are symbols of spiritual ones. Emerson tells us that we use language symbolically. Through innate, transcendental ideas, we read every natural fact as a spiritual fact. Natural facts suggest to us the spiritual ones that we carry within us and for which we must find words as they’re necessary for us to express them. This concept anticipates neuroscience and linguistic anthropology: the way we think is by association of images, which we then later distend into logical discourse. we speak by metaphors. ► an enraged man is a lion; a cunning man is a fox; a firm man is a rock; a learned man is a torch; a lamb is innocence; a snake is subtle spite; flowers express to us delicate affections; light and darkness are our familiar expression for knowledge and ignorance; heat for love. Through our transcendental, innate, ideas, we read every natural phenomenon as a spiritual, psychological, cognitive fact. → natural phenomena suggest spiritual meanings to us. Man knows by analogy (or: analogy is the instrument for knowledge) and these analogies are constant, and pervade nature → men are analogists and they study relations in all objects. They are placed in the centre of beings, and a ray of relation passes from every other being to them. ► We witnessed a historical evolution of language. As we go back in history, language becomes more picturesque (= figurative), as in rich in images (actually, made of images), until its infancy, when it is all poetry; and all spiritual facts are represented by natural symbols → in the course of its development, though, it has become corrupted because of men who “rotten [worn out, abused] diction and fasten words again to visible things [natural facts]”. Artists, poets, philosophers, are able to penetrate this rotten, exhausted dictionary and reconnect words to visible things again. For Emerson poetry must not use abused images, whose meaning we all know but no longer truly perceive. Every image must be new, poets must associate in a new way. Only “wise men” can redeem language, as in clothe again language with images → it’s a creative act, which joins experience with the present action of the mind; it’s the work of God through the instrument of man. ▪ “Nature is the symbol of the spirit”, the whole of Nature is a symbol of the spirit. « Have mountains, and waves, and skies, no significance but what we consciously give them, when we employ them as emblems of our thoughts? » → No. ► The world is emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphors, because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind. → theory of Neoplatonic emanation of beings, which states that « there seems to be a necessity in spirit to manifest itself in material forms; all things preexist in necessary Ideas in the mind of God, and are what they are by virtue of preceding affections, in the world of spirit. A Fact is the end or last issue of spirit. » Conclusion Life in contact with Nature allows us to re-discover our original use of Language, that is, to use Language as an instrument for the understanding of nature as God’s revelation. We witness a behavioral exhortation to a pragmatic use of knowledge. → to live life in harmony with nature, the love of truth and of virtue, will purge the eyes to understand her text. Chapter five. Discipline. Nature is a discipline → it’s an exercise, a training of our mental faculties in the apprehension of truth. All natural phenomena [e.g. space, time, society, labor, climate, food, animals, the mechanical forces, etc.] give us lessons, day by day, whose meaning is unlimited. They educate both the Understanding and the Reason. Every property of matter is a school for the understanding. ► Understanding adds, divides, combines, measures, and finds nutriment and room for its activity in this worthy scene. Meantime, Reason transfers all these lessons into its own world of thought, by perceiving the analogy that marries Matter and Mind. Our dealing with sensible objects is a constant exercise in the necessary learning of difference, likeness, order, and progressive arrangement; of ascent from particular to general; of combination to one end of manifold forces. Chapter seven. Spirit. Spirit is the ultimate and highest use of Nature. All the uses of nature admit of being summed in one, which yields the activity of man an infinite scope. Through all its kingdoms, to the suburbs and outskirts of things, it is faithful to the cause whence it had its origin. It always speaks of Spirit. It suggests the absolute. It is a perpetual effect. arguing that the aesthetic experience is inextricably linked to the formal qualities of the work of art itself and to the material realities of body. Poe begins his essay by acknowledging the importance of having the end-point in sight when writing something: he refers to a letter he received from Charles Dickens, in which Dickens noted that William Godwin wrote his novel Caleb Williams backwards. Although Poe is not sure that Godwin did exactly this, he must, Poe maintains, have written his novel with some idea of what the denouement or end of the novel would be. Poe tells us that he begins any new piece of writing by searching for an effect which he wishes to create in the reader’s mind and heart. He then searches for the right tone or sequence of events (in a story) to help him to create that effect. He wishes that more focus was given to the methods by which writers compose their works. He thinks that most writers, through ‘autorial [sic] vanity’, prefer to hide their methods from their readers, concealing their processes and giving the impression that they create in a ‘fine frenzy’ of inspiration. Poe also acknowledges, though, that many writers may only be partially conscious of these processes as they take place, so wouldn’t be able to recall them afterwards. Poe, by contrast, can readily recall the processes undertaken to write his works, and says he has chosen ‘The Raven’, his 1845 poem, as his example. He argues that a work of literature should not be too long if it is to create an effect: a poem or story should be capable of being read in one sitting, otherwise the real world interrupts the reader and the effect is lost. Long poems are really a series of brief poetical effects joined together. Novels are different in that they aren’t aiming for this unity of ‘effect’ in the same way. He maintains that originality, in a writer, is less about ‘impulse or intuition’ than it is about rejection: it is ‘less of invention than negation’. An original writer reads deep and wide and then rejects whatever ideas do not fit his approach, and by such a process he arrives at a new way of approaching his work. In the case of ‘The Raven’, Poe acknowledges that the individual details of the poem’s rhythm and metre are not in themselves new, but he has put them together in a new way. The rest of ‘The Philosophy of Composition’ is devoted to showing how Poe then brings these elements together so that they appear natural but also possess a rich symbolism. Poe’s reputation today rests not on his criticism, but on his poetry and tales. He has had immense influence on poets and prose writers both in the United States and abroad → among those who have followed his lead are such modernists as T. S. Eliot and William Faulkner. The tales have proven hard to classify → are they burlesque exaggerations of popular forms of Action, or serious attempts to contribute to or alter those forms, or both of these at the same time? ► Poe’s own comments deliberately obscured his intentions. Responding to a query from his literary admirer John Kennedy in 1836, who labeled his work seriotragicomic, he said that most of his tales « were intended for half banter, half satire — although I might not have fully acknowledged this to be their aim even to myself ». He surely had the pragmatism of a professional writer, who recognized the advent of a mass market and wanted to succeed in it, and understood his audience [its distractedness, its fascination with the new and short-lived and its consumerism, perhaps, other than its anomie and confusion] and sought ways to gain its attention. The features Poe worked hard at structuring → his tales his tales were of madmen, self-tormented murderers, neurasthenic necrophiliacs and other deviant types. In order to produce the greatest possible effect on his readers, aside from their shock value, Poe’s tales addressed compelling philosophical, cultural, psychological and scientific issues with: ▪ the place of irrationality, violence, and repression in human consciousness and social institutions; ▪ the alienation and dislocations attending democratic mass culture and the modernizing forces of the time; ▪ the “tug and pull” of the material and the corporeal; ▪ the absolutely terrifying dimensions of one’s own mind; ▪ new ideas about technology, and the physical universe. The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe is a ballad made up of eighteen six-line stanzas. Throughout, the poet uses trochaic octameter, a very distinctive metrical form. He uses the first-person point of view and a very consistent rhyme scheme of ABCBBB. There are many words that use the same ending, for example, the “ore” in “Lenore” and “Nevermore.” Epistrophe is also present, or the repetition of the same word at the end of multiple lines. I. Una volta in una fosca mezzanotte, mentre io meditavo, debole e stanco, sopra alcuni bizzarri e strani volumi d'una scienza dimenticata; mentre io chinavo la testa, quasi sonnecchiando - d'un tratto, sentii un colpo leggero, come di qualcuno che leggermente picchiasse - picchiasse alla porta della mia camera. «È qualche visitatore - mormorai - che batte alla porta della mia camera.» Questo soltanto, e nulla più. II. Ah! distintamente ricordo; era nel fosco dicembre, e ciascun tizzo moribondo proiettava il suo fantasma sul pavimento. Febbrilmente desideravo il mattino: invano avevo tentato di trarre dai miei libri un sollievo al dolore - al dolore per la mia perduta Lenore, e che nessuno chiamerà in terra - mai più. III. E il serico triste fruscio di ciascuna cortina purpurea, facendomi trasalire - mi riempiva di tenori fantastici, mai provati prima, sicché, in quell'istante, per calmare i battiti del mio cuore, io andava ripetendo: «È qualche visitatore, che chiede supplicando d'entrare, alla porta della mia stanza. Qualche tardivo visitatore, che supplica d'entrare alla porta della mia stanza; è questo soltanto, e nulla più». IV. Subitamente la mia anima divenne forte; e non esitando più a lungo: «Signore - dissi - o Signora, veramente io imploro il vostro perdono; ma il fatto è che io sonnecchiavo: e voi picchiaste sì leggermente, e voi sì lievemente bussaste - bussaste alla porta della mia camera, che io ero poco sicuro d'avervi udito». E a questo punto, aprii intieramente la porta. Vi era solo la tenebra, e nulla più. V. Scrutando in quella profonda oscurità, rimasi a lungo, stupito impaurito sospettoso, sognando sogni, che nessun mortale mai ha osato sognare; ma il silenzio rimase intatto, e l'oscurità non diede nessun segno di vita; e l'unica parola detta colà fu la sussurrata parola «Lenore!» Soltanto questo, e nulla più. VI. Ritornando nella camera, con tutta la mia anima in fiamme; ben presto udii di nuovo battere, un poco più forte di prima. «Certamente - dissi - certamente è qualche cosa al graticcio della mia finestra.» Io debbo vedere, perciò, cosa sia, e esplorare questo mistero. È certo il vento, e nulla più. VII. Quindi io spalancai l'imposta; e con molta civetteria, agitando le ali, si avanzò un maestoso corvo dei santi giorni d'altri tempi; egli non fece la menoma riverenza; non esitò, né ristette un istante ma con aria di Lord o di Lady, si appollaiò sulla porta della mia camera, s'appollaiò, e s'installò - e nulla più. VIII. Allora, quest'uccello d'ebano, inducendo la mia triste fantasia a sorridere, con la grave e severa dignità del suo aspetto: «Sebbene il tuo ciuffo sia tagliato e raso - io dissi - tu non sei certo un vile, orrido, torvo e antico corvo errante lontano dalle spiagge della Notte dimmi qual è il tuo nome signorile sulle spiagge avernali della Notte!» Disse il corvo: «Mai più». *nevermore almost reminds of the raven/crow’s croaking. IX. Mi meravigliai molto udendo parlare sì chiaramente questo sgraziato uccello, sebbene la sua risposta fosse poco sensata - fosse poco a proposito; poiché non possiamo fare a meno d'ammettere, che nessuna vivente creatura umana, mai, finora, fu beata dalla visione d'un uccello sulla porta della sua camera, con un nome siffatto: «Mai più». X. Ma il corvo, appollaiato solitario sul placido busto, profferì solamente quest'unica parola, come se la sua anima in quest'unica parola avesse effusa. Niente di nuovo egli pronunziò - nessuna penna egli agitò - finché in tono appena più forte di un murmure, io dissi: «Altri amici mi hanno già abbandonato, domani anch'esso mi lascerà, come le mie speranze, che mi hanno già abbandonato». Allora, l'uccello disse: «Mai più». XI. Trasalendo, perché il silenzio veniva rotto da una risposta sì giusta: «Senza dubbio - io dissi - ciò ch'egli pronunzia è tutto il suo sapere e la sua ricchezza, presi da qualche infelice padrone, che la spietata sciagura perseguì sempre più rapida, finchè le sue canzoni ebbero un solo ritornello, finché i canti funebri della sua Speranza ebbero il malinconico ritornello: «Mai, - mai più». XII. Ma il corvo inducendo ancora tutta la mia triste anima al sorriso, subito volsi una sedia con ricchi cuscini di fronte all'uccello, al busto e alla porta; quindi, affondandomi nel velluto, mi misi a concatenare fantasia a fantasia, pensando che cosa questo sinistro uccello d'altri tempi, che cosa questo torvo sgraziato orrido scarno e sinistro uccello d'altri tempi intendeva significare gracchiando: «Mai più». XIII. Così sedevo, immerso a congetturare, senza rivolgere una sillaba all'uccello, i cui occhi infuocati ardevano ora nell'intimo del mio petto; io sedeva pronosticando su ciò e su altro ancora, con la testa reclinata adagio sulla fodera di velluto del cuscino su cui la lampada guardava fissamente; ma la cui fodera di velluto viola, che la lampada guarda fissamente Ella non premerà, ah! - mai più! XIV. Allora mi parve che l'aria si facesse più densa, profumata da un incensiere invisibile, agiato da Serafini, i cui morbidi passi tintinnavano sul soffice pavimento, «Disgraziato! - esclamai - il tuo Dio per mezzo di questi angeli ti ha inviato il sollievo - il sollievo e il nepente per le tue memorie di Lenore! Tracanna, oh! tracanna questo dolce nepente, e dimentica la perduta Lenore!» Disse il corvo: «Mai più». XV. Method. Poe declares his intention to show the modus operandi by which he composes his works, he presents his method and begins “with the consideration of an effect, keeping originality in view”. He chooses “The Raven” as the most generally known, and because it “should suit at once the popular and the critical taste”. His aim is to demonstrate that “no one point in its composition is referrable either to accident or intuition → his work proceeded, step by step, to its completion with the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem. He thinks the conscious intention is what counts. The composition. Principles. 1. EXTENT, OR UNITY OF IMPRESSION Poe discusses the extent of a poem and affirms that it has to be brief, in order to be read in one sitting → this is because its unity – or totality – of impression must be kept, and a pause between two or more sittings would dissipate the impression or the intensity. The reason behind this conviction is Poe’s conception of poetry as what intensely excites, by elevating the soul – and all intense excitements are, through a physical necessity, brief → the brevity is, in fact, in direct ratio to the intensity of the intended effect. He chose for The Raven the proper length of about 100 lines – it is in fact 108. 2. CHOICE OF IMPRESSION OR EFFECT Poe discusses the extent of a poem and affirms that it has to be brief, in order to be read in one sitting → this is because its unity – or totality – of impression must be kept, and a pause between two or more sittings would dissipate the impression or the intensity. The reason behind this conviction is Poe’s conception of poetry as what intensely excites, by elevating the soul – and all intense excitements are, through a physical necessity, brief → the brevity is, in fact, in direct ratio to the intensity of the intended effect. He kept in mind his plan of rendering the work universally appreciable. He founded his search on his essential conviction that “Beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem”. ► « that pleasure which is at once the most intense, the most elevating, and the most pure, is, I believe, found in the contemplation of the beautiful » → by beauty he means not a quality, but an effect, that intense and pure elevation of soul [or of intellect, or of heart] which is experienced in consequence of contemplating ‘the beautiful’. This is most found in the poem, whereas Truth, or the satisfaction of the intellect, or Passion, or the excitement of the heart, are far more found in prose work. 3. TONE Poe’s “next question” was about the tone his composition should have. According to him, all experience had shown that the tone of the highest manifestation of Beauty is a tone of sadness, and that melancholy is the most legitimate of all poetic tones. 4. ARTISTIC MEANS → REFRAIN Poe’s next need was to find some pivot upon which the whole structure of his poem might turn. He chose the refrain because of its universality, which assured him of its intrinsic value. He wanted to improve the poetic device by varying its application and adhering to the monotone of sound while continually varying the thought → the refrain remains the same but its application to the meanings of the poem varies. He needed to establish the nature of his refrain, which was necessarily brief for him to apply it to different meanings. He also needed to establish the character of the refrain, which had to be sonorous and susceptible of protracted emphasis → it became a long < O >, the most sonorous vowel, in connection with an < R >, the most producible consonant. He had to choose one word embodying this sound and in the fullest possible, keeping with the melancholy he had established to be the tone → the word presented itself as “nevermore”. 5. CHOICE OF SPEAKER OF THE REFRAIN Poe had some difficulty in choosing the subject for voicing the refrain “nevermore”, as he couldn’t find something that justified a being with reason monotonously repeating a word. ► he realized that the assumption that it had to be a human being was incorrect, so he made it “a non-reasoning creature capable of speech” → he first thought of a parrot, but eventually chose a Raven because of its: ▪ equal ability of speech. ▪ ability of keeping with the intended tone, since it was said to be the bird of ill omen. 6. CHOICE OF OBJECT The Raven monotonously repeated the one word “Nevermore” at the conclusion of each stanza in a poem of melancholic tone of about 100 lines in length, but he now needed a topic for his poem. ► to keep the aim of supremeness also for the object of the poem, he asked himself what, according to the universal understanding of mankind, would the most melancholic topic be → of course his answer was Death. And when would this most melancholic of topics be most poetical? When Death allies itself to Beauty, as in the death of a beautiful woman → the best suited speaker would then be a bereaved (= mourning, in lutto) lover. 7. THE POEM’S SPEAKER & THE REFRAIN The Raven monotonously repeated the one word “Nevermore” at the conclusion of each stanza in a poem of melancholic tone of about 100 lines in length, but he now needed a topic for his poem. As a consequence, the best suited speaker would be a bereaved lover. How could Poe combine the two ideas of a lover lamenting his deceased mistress & a raven continuously repeating the word? → imagining the Raven employing the word in answer to the queries of the lover. To vary the application of the refrain, as intended, Poe has the speaker build a climax of questions [“queries”, whose solution he has at heart], first with non-chalance, then with growing superstition and despair which delights in self-torture. He frames the questions in a way that they anticipate, or provoke, the answer “nevermore”, which procures him the most delicious yet intolerable sorrow. 8. THE POEM CONSTRUCTION To build the climax, Poe needs to start from the most terrible, ultimate, question, which is whether the lover may entertain any hope of ever seeing the beautiful beloved woman after death, and then go backward in imagining the previous questions, in order to make their terribleness gradual. He believes the end is where all poems should begin. Poe composed the 16th stanza first, thus not only establishing the climax, but also settling the rhythm [by which he means the foot, the pattern of stressed and non-stressed syllables], the meter, and the length and general arrangement of the stanza. 9. METER & STANZA FORM Poe is faithful to his aim of originality in versification too, as he repeats that originality is “by no means a matter of impulse or intuition [but] must be elaborately sought”. ► He builds a stanza where it’s not the feet (his “rhythm”), nor the lines length (his “meter”) that are original, but their combination, whose pattern is: 8, 7 ½, 8, 7 ½, 7 ½, 3 ½ . He also adds originality in the “extension of the application of the principles of rhyme and alliteration” . 10. THE SETTING The next problem to solve was how to bring together the lover and the Raven. Since it had always appeared [to Poe] that a close circumscription of space is absolutely necessary to the effect of insulated incident (incidente isolato), he chose the lover’s chamber – a richly furnished room, in keeping with his ideas about the Beautiful. The space had the force of a frame to a picture & a moral power in keeping the focus of attention. Poe introduces the bird through the window, but plays the trick of having the lover first think that his flapping the wings against the shutter is a tapping at the door to elicit the reader’s curiosity and allow for the lover’s imagining that the spirit of his mistress has knocked, since he doesn’t see anyone. He makes the night tempestuous both for a realistic and an aesthetic reason: a. to account for the Raven seeking admission b. to build a contrast with the (physical) serenity within the chamber 11. FROM NARRATIVE TO SYMBOL Poe says that with the dénouement [the very last part, the point in a story in which the know is untied], as in the Raven’s reply “nevermore” to the lover’s final demand if he shall meet his mistress in another world, the poem reaches its completion on its “obvious” level of signification, ► that of “a simple narrative”, which he summarizes immediately afterwards (pp. 708-709). An array of incidents, however skillful and vivid, proves somewhat hard and naked: a certain complexity and suggestiveness is required → Poe introduces the concept of suggestiveness, also defined an “under-current of meaning” or “richness” by which he basically means a reverberation of metaphorical meaning, an emblematic value. 12. THE “HOW” OF SYMBOLIZATION It’s important, for Poe, to remark that this “under-current” is different from the “upper-current”. The ideal, the “excess of the suggested meaning of the so-called transcendentalists”, according to him, turn poetry into prose. Poe produced this under-current of meaning by adding the two final stanzas, whose suggestiveness was made to pervade all the narrative which had preceded them: ▪ the words “from out my heart” involve the 1st metaphorical expression in the poem; – the raven is revealed as a symbol for the narrator’s suffering –. ▪ with the answer “nevermore”, they dispose the reader to seek a moral in all what has been previously narrated, that is, backward. ▪ it is only now that the reader begins to regard the Raven as symbolic, it is not until the very last line of the very last stanza that the author’s intention to make it emblematic is revealed. Leaves of grass is accompanied by the daguerreotype of a young working man, in a bold posture – one arm akimbo [hands on the hips and elbows turned outwards] one hand in his pocket – wearing a working man’s hat on a slightly cocked head, a shirt unbuttoned at the collar, looking at the reader directly in the eyes. ► Whitman’s daguerreotype is the visual image of his self- portrayal in words (or rather, the author’s self-portrayal), which appears only in section 24 (1881 edition) of the Song: Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son, Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and breeding. No sentimentalist, no stander above men and women or apart from them, No more modest than immodest. The poet is addressing the Nation’s common people. Leaves of Grass is a huge success; Emerson himself writes a congratulation letter to Whitman, who, without asking for permission, gives the private letter to Charles Dana for publication in the New York Tribune on October 1855. The letter contained the following words: DEAR SIR –– I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of "LEAVES OF GRASS." I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed. I am very happy in reading it, as great power makes us happy. It meets the demand I am always making of what seemed the sterile and stingy nature, as if too much handiwork, or too much lymph in the temperament, were making our western wits fat and mean. I give you joy of your free and brave thought. I have great joy in it. I find incomparable things said incomparably well, as they must be. I find the courage of treatment which so delights us, and which large perception only can inspire. I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start. I rubbed my eyes a little, to see if this sunbeam were no illusion; but the solid sense of the book is a sober certainty. It has the best merits, namely, of fortifying and encouraging. I did not know until I last night saw the book advertised in newspaper that I could trust the name as real and available for a post-office. I wish to see my benefactor, and have felt much like striking my tasks, and visiting New York to pay you my respects. R.W. EMERSON, 21 July 1855 The work was revolutionary, but on the other hand it was also very criticized, as it talked about homosexuality, human sensuality, and desire, among other things. This provoked a harsh, irritated, and offended, critical response, left as an anonymous review – actually penned by “a Boston Unitarian minister”. This kind of review was the most common. ► These critics resented Whitman’s anti-conformism in respect of the form and the content of his poetry. The poems are neither in rhyme nor blank verse, but in a sort of excited prose broken into lines without any attempt at measure or regularity, and, as many readers will perhaps think, without any idea of sense or reason. The writer’s scorn for usages of good writing extends to the vocabulary he adopts → words usually banished from polite society, but also terms never before heard or seen, and slang expressions. Whitman also receives ambivalent contemporary reactions, where the shocked feeling is mixed with one of reluctant admiration → by those, Whitman is described as a compound of the New England transcendentalism and New York rowdy (chiasso). The reviews said that only someone “with sufficient self-conceit and contempt for public taste to affront the usual propriety of diction might have written this gross yet elevated, this superficial yet profound, this preposterous yet fascinating book”. Song of Myself, Leaves of Grass. The form. The poems were composed assuming Emerson’s aesthetic of the organic principle in art, so that its form is expressive, meaning it discovers its own form while being written. In fact, the poems don’t follow a precise metric nor a rhyming scheme, but the lineation, called clausal prosody – poetry based on clauses, sentences without a verb – is based on a rhetorical, more than a metrical construction. Whitman designs his poems as a catalogue, a listing → his speech floods. The form is expressive in itself → the sounds delivers itself, or at least a large part of it; he uses a lot of sounds and figures of speech like onomatopoeias, assonance, alliteration, parallelisms and crescendos, an imitative and symbolic rhythm and an expressive syntax. A hyperbolic example of the latter ones is “out of the cradle endlessly rocking”, for which scholars have coined new words in order to define Whitman’s prosody: ▪ oceanic sentence ▪ psychic rhyme ▪ space-empathy ▪ kinetic empathy Out of the cradle endlessly rocking Out of the cradle endlessly rocking Out of the mocking-bird’s throat, the musical shuttle, Out of the Ninth-month midnight, Over the sterile sands and the fields beyond, where the child leaving his bed wander’d alone, bareheaded, barefoot, Down from the shower’d halo, Up from the mystic play of shadows twining and twisting as if they were alive, Out from the patches of briers and blackberries, From the memories of the bird that chanted to me, From your memories sad brother, from the fitful risings and fallings I heard, From under that yellow half-moon late-risen and swollen as if with tears, From those beginning notes of yearning and love there in the mist, From the thousand responses of my heart never to cease, From the myriad thence-arous’d words, From the word stronger and more delicious than any, From such as now they start the scene revisiting, As a flock, twittering, rising, or overhead passing, Borne hither, ere all eludes me, hurriedly, A man, yet by these tears a little boy again, Throwing myself on the sand, confronting the waves, I, chanter of pains and joys, uniter of here and hereafter, Taking all hints to use them, but swiftly leaping beyond them, A reminiscence sing. (…) In this poem Whitman recalls the awakening of his poetic vocation. He was a boy when he realized that he wanted to become a poet. He was on a shore of Long Island, listening to the sad song of a mockingbird, lamenting the loss of his mate. ► This singing becomes the metaphor of Whitman’s idea of poetry → the poet wants to move and touch his readers the same way the mockingbird [with his singing, pure sound] moved him. ▪ out of the → anaphora ▪ as a flock → simile ▪ cradle endlessly rocking → alliterations ▪ ninth-month → quakers way to define months The poem’s a long list of movements, physical [over the, down from, up from] and then metaphorical [from your memories] → this is why it has been called kinetic empathy. On a syntactic level, Whitman breaks the typical English structure of the sentence [subject + predicate, or just verb in the simplest sentences, + object & complement]. In his poem we see that the subject “ I ” comes is in the 20th line, postponing the beginning of the sentence. The verb sing is the last word of the stanza. This accumulating effect [catalogue] is called oceanic sentence [whole thing is one single sentence], an oceanic wave of words, that becomes bigger and bigger, until it finally falls on the reader when the meaning is unveiled. There are two different kinds of free verse, the long and the short one: a. the short free verse, used by modernists like William Carlos Williams (e.g. The red Wheelbarrow); b. the long free verse, used by Whitman; The Red Wheelbarrow William Carlos Williams so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens. Song of Myself Walt Whitman Walt Whitman, a kosmos of Manhattan the son, Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and breeding. No Sentimentalist, no stander above men and women or apart from them, No more modest than immodest. Whitman did not invent the long free verse, though, he makes it popular; before him, Tupper and Cranch tried it, but it went unnoticed. This form has always been associated with long philosophical or political poems, often inclined to some form of syncretism and animated by religious enthusiasm. Plus, the long free verse is more similar to the primitive forms of composition, such as the North American natives, Australian and African aborigines, because they had to enchant with their incantatory rhythm (religious poems). According to Miller, a much more coherent reading of Song of Myself would see it as a “dramatic representation” of a mystical experience → the poem is NOT a transcript of an actual mystical experience, but a work of art in which such an experience has been conceived in the imagination and is represented dramatically, with the author assuming the main role. The central portion of the poem may be related, step by step, to the “Mystic Way”, as described by Evelyn Underhill in → Mysticism, the historical and classical model for the mystical experience. James Miller “Song of Myself as Inverted Mystical Experience” Evelyn Underhill draws her definitions from writings of actual mystics, having studied them for long. Mystics says that it’s impossible to neither recount their experiences rationally, nor report them in a discourse. In fact, the language of mystics is in many ways similar to the language of poetry, for its use of metaphors and images. o his preparation and his entry into a state of mystical consciousness (sections 1-5). - preparation by assuming an attitude of receptivity - invitation to be self-reliant - evocation of the importance of the senses - perspective of the reconciliation of opposites - apostrophe to the soul and its personification - intuitive knowledge of the relation between self and God o his progressively significant and meaningful experience in this state (sections 6-49) a. [6-16] AWAKENING OF SELF, when the self awakens from the mystical consciousness by starting to ask itself questions → interrogation of grass as the symbol of divine enigma1; the death theme (the “symphonic treatment”)2, • the “caresser of life”: knowledge by empathy3. b. [17-32] PURIFICATION OF SELF, extension of his discourse to a universal dimension, beyond the US. According to Miller Whitman meant that, in order to get in touch with God, we need senses → in fact Whitman uses touch and hearing in his poems, as they are immediate knowledge. So, purification, to Whitman, means the opposite of tradition: don’t purify your sinful body, as the tradition would say, but CELEBRATE yourself, as your soul, and as something holy that will lead you to God. c. [33-37] ILLUMINATION & DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL → a traditional mystical image that means that the soul is searching for God, but it isn’t finding His light; it’s a very frustrating state of mind, that’s why it’s surrounded by the darkness. The soul is eventually found by God’s light. d. [37-43] UNION THROUGH FAITH AND LOVE, it is the “felt” union you can feel through your affections and the concept of the risk of the “usual mistake” that is to say excluding the divine from this vision. e. [44-49] UNION THROUGH PERCEPTION → upturning of the perception of: ✓ what is real and what is illusory – the true knowledge, correct perception of the categories of space & time and the position of the self in them. ✓ the union with Christ – the mystical wedding (Brautmystic) ✓ the concept of how knowledge of God is produced [section 48] ✓ the defeat of death [section 49] o his emergence from the mystical state (sections 50-52). ► the experience is physically exhausting, and the mystic doesn’t know how to explain it with words, but feels the “BLISS”, that Whitman calls simply “happiness”. ✓ physical exhaustion [section 50] ✓ impossibility to report the experience [section 50] ✓ enunciation of the perspective of vision as in form, union, design, eternal life, happiness [section 50] ✓ apostrophe to the reader: a. he is urged to listen and respond [sect. 51] b. he is reassured about the contradictory quality of the message (through the Emersonian appreciation of the genius’ contradictory character) [sect. 51] c. farewell by means of rapid movements of departure that are immediately negated, countered, by the promise of waiting for the reader under the soles of his boots [sect. 52] William James, in his Varieties of Religious Experience (1920), quotes Whitman’s Song as a “sporadic type of mystical experience”, in which the individual gains sudden, fleeting insights of transcendent knowledge. Emily Dickinson was born in 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts from Edward Dickinson and Emily Norcross. She descended from an ancient family; her forefathers came to the USA with John Winthrop in 1830, during the Great Migration, and founded several schools and institutions. Her father is a lawyer and a treasurer of Amherst College. He serves twice as a Delegate to the Mass.General Court in Boston. Dickinson attends the Amherst Academy for seven years. Emily often wrote on separate sheets of paper → she used to do a sort of binding, and in 1858 she sew together around 40 fascicles. 1861-1862 → the “flood years” (“anni della piena”, major literary production), during which she has a breakdown and starts keeping within her father’s house premises and locking herself in her room on the first floor. ► She wasn’t pleased of people – not relatives but editors, etc. – visiting her; she wouldn’t come down from her room. She didn’t even want doctors to visit her and would bake cookies for children but then drop them from a balcony. It’s in this period that she starts wearing tiny white dresses which could have many meanings → virginity, devotion to a certain cause or to literature; anyway, it’s definitely a sign of her deciding something drastic about her life. Consequences have been drawn from her life to her poetry. She was said to have been affected by agoraphobia and anorexia nervosa, and rumors said she was homosexual – due to a warm, beautiful letter (but since that was a habit of the time between women friends, it cannot be considered a formal proof), people discussed an alleged relationship with Susan Gilbert, who then married Austin, Emily’s brother. Susan would have three children, Edward [Ned], Martha [Mattie] and Gilbert [Gib]. After Susan’s marriage the ‘friendship’ between the two loosened, which brought Emily to feel resentment. The reason why her life is so important is that she used her experience to write → she would translate her life in an ideal world. She had been critiqued for decades for not being able to portrait a coherent vision of the world, which caused her to be accused of being a bad writer. She drew a conception of poetry, poetics and poetic language that reflected her life experiences. 1. she met with many death experiences → it was not unusual for her time, due to poor health conditions, but since she was highly sensitive she felt like she was forced to find a reason behind these experiences, this continuous loss of people around her: o In 1844 her friend Sophia Holland dies – first experience of loss (and trauma). o In 1847 she meets Ben Newton, an apprentice of her father, who became her 1st “preceptor”, in terms of guide in literature. He dies in 1853. o In 1850 Leonard Humphrey, a teacher of the Amherst Academy, dies. o In 1854 she meets Charles Wadsworth, her second “preceptor”, in Philadelphia, on her way back from Washington, during one of the few trips she took – this time to see her father; she probably falls in love with him, as allegedly shown in Master letters, but he is married. He will die in 1882. o In 1874 her father dies. o In 1882 her mother also dies after suffering a paralytic stroke 8 years earlier. o In 1883 her nephew Gilbert dies extremely young. 2. she never married nor had an official relationship apart from the one (in 1877) with Otis P. Lord, who was the same age as her father. The language in her letters is intentionally very deep, just like every choice in her life was conscious, a movement of freedom. She deeply lived in solitude; it was her choice to have her own space, she wasn’t’ simply “alone”. She was happy in her own way and with her own choices. In 1862, Wadsworth moves to California – but will be back to Philadelphia in 1869 – and Dickinson meets Samuel Bowles, a family friend and the director of the Springfield Daily Republican, who published some of Emily’s work. Dickinson was very stubborn and confident in her choices, so when she saw her poems being changed – grammar, syntax, language twisting etc. – in the SDR publications, she decided to never publish again. “Pubblicare è come vendersi all’asta”. In 1862 she even writes to Thomas Wentworth Higginson (a progressive editor), who held a review in the Atlantic Monthly, “Letter to a Young Contributor”, asking him if he was too busy to tell her if her verse was alive. ▪ Before dying, she tells Vinnie – her sister Lavinia – to burn everything, but Vinnie goes to Mabel Loomis Todd & Higginson instead and asks to publish her work (1890, 1st publication), after Susan Gilbert & Higginson refuse to edit it. ▪ In 1958 – a fac simile edition with 1st critical edition of Letters of Emily Dickinson is published with all the variants → three volumes edited by Thomas Johnson ▪ the volumes are perfected by Ralph W. Franklin, who in 1981 publishes The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson. ▪ he also publishes The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum Edition in 1998. preceptor, Wadsworth. The language is ambiguous as she’s trying to keep the mystery while also dramatizing the relationship. The two personae, or “masks”, that she wears in this letter are: 1. the little child, Daisy 2. the figure of the Queen (Princess or Empress), in some way elected by God. Thomas Higginson goes visit Dickinson during her “lockdown” years and reports it to his wife. Aug. 16, 1870 … A step like a pattering child’s in entry & in glided a little plain woman with two smooth bands of reddish hair & a face a little like Belle Dove’s; not plainer - with no good feature - in a very plain & exquisitely clean white pique & a blue net worsted shawl. She came to me with two day lilies which she put in a sort of childlike way into my hand & said “These are my introduction” in a soft frightened breathless childlike voice - & added under her breath Forgive me if I am frightened; I never see strangers & hardly know what I say - but she talked soon & thenceforward continuously - & deferentially - sometimes stopping to ask me to talk instead of her - but readily recommencing. Emily Dickinson is here described as: ▪ little plain woman, with no particularly beautiful traits, wearing a very simple, clean, white cotton dress. ▪ two smooth bands of reddish hair. ▪ somehow childish, with two lilies in her hands, defined as “introduction”. ▪ with a childlike, frightened, soft voice. We also found Dickinson’s definition of poetry in her replies. 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. These are the only way I know it. Is there any other way. We also have proof that, despite the deaths that followed her around, she still finds great pleasure and happiness in living. → “I find ecstasy in living – the mere sense of living is joy enough”. Otis Phillips Lord was a Massachusetts lawyer and politician who served as a justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. My lovely Salem smiles at me. I seek his Face so often - but I have done with guises. I confess that I love him - rejoice that I love him - I thank the maker of Heaven and Earth - that gave him me to love - the exultation floods me. I cannot find my channel - the Creek turns Sea - at thought of thee – (559, ca 1878) ▪ my lovely Salem smiles at me → he was from Salem. ▪ she thanks God, “the maker of Heaven and Earth” for giving her Otis. ▪ she’s proud of her love as she confesses and rejoices [si rallegra] it. ▪ her love is described as a strong Creek that turns to Sea. Oh, my too beloved, save me from the idolatry which would crush us both – (560) It is strange that I miss you at night so much when I was never with you - but the punctual love invokes you soon as my eyes are shut - and I wake warm with the want sleep had almost filled – (645, 1880) Sweetest name, but I know a sweeter – Emily Jumbo Lord. Have I your approval? (780, ca 1882) We also have other portraits of Dickinson thanks to: ▪ Mabel Loomis Todd’s journal: Mabel described Emily as a ‘genius’ in many respects, “a lady whom the people call the Myth. She is a sister of Mr. Dickinson, & seems to be the climax of all the family oddity” “She has not been out of her house for fifteen years…She writes the strangest poems, & very remarkable ones.”, “She wears always white, & has her hair arranged as was the fashion fifteen years ago when she went into retirement.” (Sept. 1882) ▪ Higginson’s description of Dickinson’s funeral: La campagna era fulgida, la giornata perfetta… in ogni angolo della casa e del giardino regnava un’atmosfera singolare, strana e suggestiva – quasi una Casa Usher più nobile e pia… sul volto di Emily Dickinson un prodigioso ritorno di giovinezza… Non un capello bianco, non una ruga, e una pace assoluta sulla bella fronte. #445: twas just this time, last year, I died / I know I heard the Corn, / When I was carried by the Farms – / It had the tassels on. Death is her central theme, the one that occupies the largest space in her poems. She represents the two crucial stages of our experience of death: 1. our psychological response to both the moment of occurring → il trauma 2. the extended time following the trauma, the prolonged state of mourning → il lutto #937 I felt a Cleaving in my Mind – As if my Brain had split – I tried to match it – Seam by Seam – But could not make them fit. The thought behind, I strove to join Unto the thought before – But Sequence ravelled out of Sound Like Balls – upon a Floor Content Analysis Ho sentito una spaccatura nella mia mente, come se il mio cervello si fosse spaccato. Ho provato a farlo combaciare, orlo per orlo, ma non ho potuto farlo. Il pensiero successivo ho cercato di ricongiungere col precedente, ma la sequenza si è srotolata fuori dal suono come gomitoli sul pavimento. ▪ she’s trying to represent the wound, the trauma that occurs when the human psyche meets with death → it’s something that prevents humans to think consequentially, death prevents you from going on. ▪ cleaving → splitting, separating, tearing apart, implying effort or even violence. She compares herself to a seamstress who is unable to align two pieces of cut fabric to represent the idea that she cannot connect the thoughts in her mind. ▪ ravelled out like balls – upon a floor → thread is usually wrapped really tight, but here we lose coherence, as the ball [of yarn] is described falling on the floor ravelling. ▪ in the 1st stanza → Dickinson employs more dashes, giving us the idea of the fragmented thoughts of a person dealing with trauma. ▪ in the 2nd stanza → less dashes, that could symbolize the attempt of the narrator to collect the thoughts. As a result, the phrases are longer and more complex. With life-in-death we mean the span of time spent grieving and processing death, after the prolonged trauma. She’s trying to describe the psyche’s reaction to an extended period of mourning. #341 After great pain, a formal feeling comes— The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs— The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore, And Yesterday, or Centuries before? The Feet, mechanical, go round— Of Ground, or Air, or Ought— A Wooden way Regardless grown, A Quartz contentment, like a stone— This is the Hour of Lead— Remembered, if outlived, As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow— First—Chill—then Stupor—then the letting go— Content Analysis The poem begins with the speaker describing the disorientation and numbness that comes with loss. One enters a period of formal feeling which is actually an absence of feeling. The next lines use various parts of the body to show how the cold of loss spreads everywhere. The feet are wooden and mechanical, and move on autopilot. One lives like a stone does, cold, and without any progress. Time passes, but one does not move. The specific time after mourning is called “the Hour of Lead” (piombo), heavy on the person’s mind. ▪ wooden way → alliteration; ▪ formal feeling → alliteration; ▪ the stiff heart questions → personification of the heart; ▪ stanzas do not follow a single rhyme scheme, but have patterns of their own. Stanza one rhymes, ABCC, then with different end sounds, stanza two: ABCDD, and finally stanza three rhymes: ABCC, exception on the last two lines. ▪ quartz contentment, like a stone → could be referred to the thought of falling into this steady, emotionless state and being content there. ▪ she uses several rigid, sturdy materials, like wood, quartz, stone. ▪ in remember if outlived → no subject, the sentence has passive construction. ▪ Dickinson is using the imagery of something that does not want to feel anymore. ► she’s suggesting that somehow the psyche itself is dying after witnessing death; the psyche tries not to feel things anymore. ▪ idea of being alive but not mechanically. ▪ first – chill – then Stupor – letting go → she is comparing the feeling of loss, with the paralyzing “Stupor” it can put one in, to death. #712 Content Analysis ▪ bare feet → human deprivation, she portrays herself as having always lived in poverty because the experiences of death deprived her of everything ▪ brooks of plush → sweet and soft descriptions. #124 Safe in their Alabaster Chambers – Untouched by Morning – and untouched by noon – Sleep the meek members of the Resurrection, Rafter of Satin and Roof of Stone – Grand go the Years, In the Crescent above them – Worlds scoop their Arcs – and Firmaments - row – Diadems - drop – And Doges surrender – Soundless as Dots, On a Disk of Snow. Content Analysis Safe in their marble tombs, unaffected by either morning or midday, the dead sleep, patiently awaiting their resurrection at Judgment Day, lying beneath "ceilings" of silky coffin-lining and the "roofs" of their stone caskets. The years sweep above the dead in majestic curves; planets carve out their paths overhead, and the heavens skim past like rowboats. Crowns (and kingdoms) fall to the ground and powerful rulers are defeated—and it all happens as silently as droplets falling onto a circle of snow. Safe in their alabaster chambers: this idea suggests someone tucked up safely in bed, protected from the ravages of the outside world. The clue is in ‘Sleep the meek members of the Resurrection’. Disks and circumferences are recurrent images in Dickinson’s poetry. Symbols of totality, achieved maturity, full conscience, end of life. ▪ untouched by [..] untouched by → diacope, could maybe highlight that the dead is securely insulated from the passage of time. ▪ death is compared to → sleep. ▪ coffin is compared to → chamber. ▪ images of Christianity → belief that life after death is real; the dead sleep as a living person would, but they will awake when the "resurrection" occurs. ▪ idea of resurrection → belief that Jesus Christ will come a second time for the meek members of the resurrection. ► Matthew 5:5 states "blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth". #449 I died for beauty, but was scarce Adjusted in the tomb, When one who died for truth was lain In an adjoining room. He questioned softly why I failed? “For beauty,” I replied. “And I for truth - the two are one; We brethren are,” he said. And so, as kinsmen met a-night, We talked between the rooms, Until the moss had reached our lips, And covered up our names. Content Analysis Allegorical work set in a tomb, where a person who died for beauty interacts briefly with someone who died for truth. The speaker then declares that Truth and Beauty are the same. Sono morto per amore della bellezza, ma ero appena stato sepolto quando qualcuno che era morto per amore della verità è stato sepolto in una tomba vicina. Mi chiese calmo perché fossi morto e io gli dissi che ero morto per la bellezza. Lui mi rispose che era morto per la verità e che le due cose sono una cosa sola; quindi, noi due eravamo come una famiglia. E così, come parenti che passano la notte insieme, continuammo a parlare tra le nostre tombe, finché il muschio del cimitero non coprì le nostre bocche e i nomi sulle nostre lapidi. ▪ three quatrains uniformly structured as iambic tetrameter & iambic trimeter. ▪ rhyme scheme is ABCB. ▪ beauty and truth are the same thing → inspired by Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”. ► the ode describes an ancient urn painted with lively scenes, a work of art that seems timeless. Famously, the ode sums up the urn's message to humankind: "Beauty is truth, truth beauty." Unlike Keats's ode, Dickinson’s poem suggests that only death is eternal, outlasting everything human-like → the grave-covering moss [muschio] has the final say, obscuring beauty, truth, and everything but the fact of death. #467 We do not play on Graves— Because there isn’t Room— Besides—it isn’t even—it slants And People come— And put a Flower on it— And hang their faces so— We’re fearing that their Hearts will drop— And crush our pretty play— And so we move as far As Enemies—away— Just looking round to see how far It is—Occasionally—. Content Analysis Death is described from a children’s perspective, who’s not touched by the fear of death that adults have. Children don't have this distressing perspective that adults [and readers] have about death, so they only run away when the arrival of the grieving, flower-wearing, mourning adults makes them realize that they must [it's a cultural fact] have this approach toward death. In the poem, death, which is conceptualized by adults as something sad and fearful, does not frighten children. The way people think about death is cultural, taught. The implication could be that people should “perceive death” as children do. ▪ children perspective → inspired by Blake, “Song of Innocence and Experience”. ► pastoral world of childhood against an adult world of corruption and repression. Songs of Innocence dramatize the naive hopes and fears that inform the lives of children and trace their transformation as the child grows into adulthood. Some of the poems are written from the perspective of children, while others are about children from an adult point of view. ▪ childish tone → could be supported by the series of rather breathless "and" – five of them – that kind of remind of the way children will talk when scared or confused. Emily Dickinson represents death in many guises: ▪ as a knight / a gentleman coming to fetch his bride; ▪ as from within a dead body, at her own mourning or funeral; ▪ as corpses talking to each other in a tomb, or laughing in their graves; ▪ from children’s perspective Dickinson was inheriting knowledge, but she found that it wouldn’t provide her an explanation of what she was going through, it was not enough for her, so she’s criticizing theological knowledge. #1601 Of God we ask one favor That we may be forgiven For what, he is presumed to know The Crime, from us, is hidden Content Analysis A Dio chiediamo un favore, che ci perdoni, per che cosa si suppone che lo sappia lui, il crimine a noi è nascosto. ▪ Dickinson talks about original sin. ▪ Her tone is somewhat impertinent, annoyed tone, hers is a rebellion against dogma and theology. #1609 Paradise is of the option Whosoever will Dwell in Eden notwithstanding Adam and Repeal Content Analysis Even though Paradise was repealed for Adam, its infinite Beauty is so close to us that we can, at any moment, dwell in Eden in life by allowing ourselves to be enchanted. She claims that the entrance to heaven can be chosen, that we are not condemned by original sin. ▪ option → paradise is not something predetermined, but rather something that we can choose for ourselves. ▪ whosoever will → individual choice. ▪ four stanzas, each consisting of quatraines. ▪ rhyme scheme is ABCB. ▪ atmosphere → a sense of hope, suggesting that paradise is always within our reach if we are willing to actively seek it. #237 I think just how my shape will rise – When I shall be “forgiven” – Till Hair – and Eyes – and timid Head – Are out of sight – in Heaven – I think just how my lips will weigh With shapeless – quivering – prayer – That you – so late – “Consider” me – The “Sparrow” of your care – 1 … And so I con that thing – “forgiven” – Until – delirious – borne By my long bright – and longer – trust – [Till with long fright] I drop my heart – unshriven! Content Analysis Reference to the Puritan’s idea of the holy desperation: she’s been looking for God, trying to find within herself signs of her being one of the elected [church of visible saints], but this is just making her anxious, desperate. She’s denouncing the fact that within this theological system she won’t be saved. She will be lost. God is caring for all his creature, but she has the feeling he’s not caring for her. ▪ the “sparrow” of your care → ironic tone; she says God takes care of all the creatures, even the least important of them; the sparrow is a metaphor for herself. #1545 The Bible is an antique Volume – Written by faded men At the suggestion of Holy Spectres – … Had but the Tale a warbling Teller All the Boys would come – Orpheus’s Sermon captivated – It did not condemn – Content Analysis The Bible is something belonging to the past, it’s no longer valid in the contemporary society, it’s no longer directly experienced, the men who wrote it are faded, and the Holy Ghost is now more a Holy Spectres. Her beliefs were not against God or spirituality, but rather against organized religion as it was practiced in her time. Dickinson condemns this kind of theology, arguing that it leads to an exhausted state of mind. She elaborates death according to a kind of proto-existentialist theoretical frame. She was very modern in her vision and portrait of Death. One way of managing existence according to her is If any sink, assure that this, now standing – Failed like Themselves – and conscious that it rose Grew by the Fact, and not the Understanding How Weakness passed – or Force – arose Tell that the Worst, is easy in a moment – Dread, but the Whizzing, before the Ball – When the Ball enters, enters Silence – Dying – annuls the power to kill Could be referred to human vulnerability, resilience – the sinking element of the poem represents the inevitable failures, losses, and tragedies that we experience in life, while the standing element represents the survivors who manage to persevere and overcome, but not without gaining awareness of the vulnerability, which makes us survivors but not triumphant survivor; the final phrase, "to share its sundered Fate—," suggests a sense of unity and fellowship between the sinking and standing elements. ▪ rhyme scheme is ABAB in the 1st stanza. ▪ the poem's first line, if any sink, is a conditional statement that sets the tone for the rest of the poem. The word "sink" suggests a sense of loss, failure, and despair. It could be a metaphor for something that has fallen, collapsed, or been destroyed. ▪ the second line, assure that This—now standing—, introduces a new element in the poem – something that has survived the sinking. Summing up, Death for Emily Dickinson is, “chronologically”: ▪ fundamental issue for human beings ▪ greatest crisis in her life ▪ cause of depression (breakdown) ▪ starting point for her search for God ▪ not experienced as completely negative, nor permanent ▪ out of an experience of death (or loss, deprivation) may come a kind of rebirth #280 I felt a Funeral, in my Brain, And Mourners to and fro Kept treading — treading — till it seemed That Sense was breaking through — And when they all were seated, A Service, like a Drum — Kept beating — beating — till I thought My mind was going numb — And then I heard them lift a Box And creak across my Soul With those same Boots of Lead, again, Then Space — began to toll, As all the Heavens were a Bell, And Being, but an Ear, And I, and Silence, some strange Race, Wrecked, solitary, here — And then a Plank in Reason, broke, And I dropped down, and down — And hit a World, at every plunge, And Finished knowing — then — Content Analysis Ho sentito un funerale nel mio cervello e i compiangenti continuavano a camminare avanti e indietro pesantemente fin quando non è sembrato che il senso si facesse breccia e quando tutti erano seduti, un servizio come un tamburo continuava a battere, battere fin quando non ho pensato che la mia mente si stesse intorpidendo; e poi li ho sentiti sollevare una scatola e stridere ancora attraverso la mia anima con gli stessi scarponi di piombo, e lo spazio ha iniziato a rintoccare come se tutti i cieli si fossero fatti campana e l’essere nient'altro che un orecchio, ed io, e il silenzio, una razza straniera qui naufragata in solitario esilio [immagine di un altro mondo], poi l’asse della mia ragione si spezzò e mi sentii sprofondare giù, e giù ancora, e ad ogni tuffo urtando contro un mondo, e la conoscenza allora ebbe fine. ▪ very rhythmic, the meter is the same of ballads, with alternating iambic trimeter (2nd and 4th line) and tetrameter (1st and 3rd line). ▪ the box → she doesn’t call it a coffin, as she’s inside of it and doesn’t have concrete experience of what is happening, she’s not conscious of her surroundings. ▪ treading, treading, beating, beating → obsessive, visceral, repetitive, it’s like the funeral is giving the tempo of this funeral, perhaps also mimicking this drums. ► this rhetorical device is called epizeuxis and it’s the repetition of a word or phrase in immediate succession to create emphasis. ▪ rhythm marked by the present participles [beating, treading] & dental consonants [kept, till I thought] that contrast with [m] and [n] of "my mind is going numb". ▪ creak across → onomatopea ▪ and I, and silence → as in cosmic silence ▪ repetition of “and” ( vv. 2, 5, 9, 10, 14 17, 18, 19, 20) → anaphora, but also polysyndeton, which is the deliberate insertion of conjunctions into a sentence for the purpose of slowing up the rhythm of the prose. She then assumes an even more paradoxical position. She thought she felt that she had been elected by grace, if we want to use a puritan concept, her experience of death turns into a sudden appreciation of vitality, she expresses these feelings in her ecstatic poems. Emily Dickinson goes back to the roots of Puritanism by claiming her right to a personally experienced and felt faith as she rejects inherited knowledge. Her experience of death turns into a sudden appreciation of “vitality” → she learns the paradoxical logic of the psychological cycles of life and death. From this conception of her knowledge of God – which is the same as a world vision, a cosmology, an explanation of things – she derives her conception of poetry and her poetic language – which is “oblique”, or “slant” – and her use of meter, grammar and syntax, punctuation (the dashes, long discussed by scholars), metaphor and tone show. #306: the ecstasy The Soul’s Superior instants Occur to Her—alone— When friend—and Earth’s occasion Have infinite withdrawn— Or She—Herself—ascended To too remote a Height For lower Recognition Than Her Omnipotent— This Mortal Abolition Is seldom—but as fair As Apparition—subject To Autocratic Air— Eternity’s disclosure To favorites—a few— Of the Colossal substance Of Immortality Content Analysis Gli istanti superiori dell’anima accadono a lei [anima], sola, quando gli amici e la quotidianità mondana si sono ritirati infinitamente, oppure lei è ascesa ad un’altezza troppo remota per un riconoscimento inferiore che non sia quello del suo onnipotente [l’inglese ammette due interpretazioni, l’onnipotente che la sceglie, oppure che lei riconosce l’onnipotente], questa abolizione mortale accade raramente ma è altrettanto bella quanto un’apparizione soggetta ad aria autocratica. ► first stanza → in order to prepare for the search of God one has to withdraw him/herself from distraction, leaving earthly things, be alone and focus on meditation (reference to Emerson). ► second stanza → the elevation of the soul. ► third stanza → elected limitless dimension of the divine (mention of Revelation – Apparition). ► fourth stanza → concept of predestination. ▪ we perceive a metaphorical distance, it’s a sort of ethereal poem. ▪ abolition / apparition / autocratic → linked by latin etymology, perhaps she’s trying to convey the feeling of distance and abstraction. ▪ soul’s superior instants → alliteration. ▪ she herself ascended → alliteration. ▪ too remote a height → alliteration. ▪ favourites / few → alliteration. Dickinson organizes space according to a precise construction – “superior instants”, “Earth’s occasion”, “remote a height”, “this mortal dimension” – so with her we have a sort of lower dimension [earth] and then an upper [transcendental] dimension which is typical for the search of God. Her style is very difficult because it's often so abstract, as she’s merely expressing feelings that are often vague and ambiguous sensations. This is exactly the purpose of her poetry. ► Dickinson has been called a metaphysical poet and her main concern is religious, so if she’s trying to express this, she needs a language somehow able to communicate her experience of God. Martin Heidegger in his study of poetic language says that poetic language is the only one which can lend itself to communicate this kind of feelings, as it doesn't try to close its own references to exhaust them, especially when the object may be ambiguous and indefinite. The idea is that poetic language doesn't describe things accurately → its main purpose is not conveying information precisely, but suggesting meanings, feelings, sensations and emotions instead. #1125 Oh Sumptuous moment Slower go That I may gloat on thee— ‘Twill never be the same to starve Now I abundance see— Which was to famish, then or now— The difference of Day Ask him unto the Gallows led— With morning in the sky— Content Analysis Similar to the other poem, “twill be never be the same to starve / now I abundance see” highlights the fact that after a moment of abundance, the absence, the lack of something, is felt much more intensely. #827 The Only News I know Is Bulletins all Day From Immortality. The Only Shows I see— Tomorrow and Today— Perchance Eternity— The Only One I meet Is God—The Only Street— Existence—This traversed If Other News there be— Or Admirabler Show— I’ll tell it You— Content Analysis In the first stanza, she speaks of how she doesn't read the news, as she only thinks about immortality. In the second stanza, she states that she doesn't “watch” [see] shows, since she prefers living in spirituality and wants to live for eternity [in heaven]; however, she appears unsure, as she uses the word “perchance”. In the third stanza, she claims that the only person she meets is God, and that she is seeking existence freely. With the last stanza, she promise the reader to tell him if she “mad.” Just because social majority encourages people to act or think a certain way it doesn’t make it necessarily sensible, intelligent, or truthful. ▪ those with a “discerning Eye” → people who are able to look at the world with sharp, considered judgment and that can see right through society’s idea of sanity → within their supposed “madness” lies “divinest sense”—the most sensible sense there is. ► the word “divinest” suggests that there’s even something holy about this sense. This group is more coherent. Wife and bride poems contained recurrent images that convey the finally achieved feeling of union with God that in those poems Dickinson represents using the image of a young wife and bride → she’s not the first to do it, as the idea actually derives from a historical mystical tradition called bridal mysticism [from the German term, Brautmystik]. It usually tells the story of a bride who awaits the return of his groom, as a symbol for the soul that can’t wait to be joined by God again. Starting with the Bible, where Jewish theology used this metaphor for Israel and God, various forms of bridal mysticism were used during history, for both genders, as sometimes people talked about being the groom instead of the bride. #506 He touched me, so I live to know That such a day, permitted so, I groped upon his breast— It was a boundless place to me And silenced, as the awful sea Puts minor streams to rest. And now, I’m different from before, As if I breathed superior air— Or brushed a Royal Gown— My feet, too, that had wandered so— My Gypsy face—transfigured now— To tenderer Renown— Into this Port, if I might come, Rebecca, to Jerusalem, Would not so ravished turn— Nor Persian, baffled at her shrine Lift such a Crucifixial sign To her imperial Sun. Content Analysis The girl portrayed is either a bride or a young wife, parallel to a traditional production of bridal mysticism. The poem tells us that this was a once- in-a-lifetime occurrence, as the day when this happened, when this embrace was “permitted”, will be something she will remember all her life. She is “different from before” now as if she had breathed heavenly air or touched a monarch, she’s so softly overwhelmed that even her face is transfigured into something more tender and loveable. She cites Rebecca [Genesis, 24], a young woman selected to be Isaac’s wife of Isaac, who had to travel many days to reach him, in prayerful joy at being reportedly chosen by God. The poem’s speaker, then, is claiming she would be so moved, so ravished, to take port once again in her lover’s arms that she would exceed Rebecca’s joy. Structure Analysis ▪ the poem is written in 3 six-line stanzas. - the 1st stanza tells the reader about the day of the embrace and what it was like. - the 2nd describes the speaker’s transfiguration - the 3rd describes the joy she expects when she finally comes to the Port that is her beloved—probably in the eternal marriage. ▪ each stanza has two rhyming iambic tetrameter lines followed by an iambic trimeter line—both of which rhyme. The result is a very tightly knit poem. ▪ the dashes [ — ] give a very spoken quality to the poem, as if Dickinson is recounting something wistfully to the reader. The marriage of a couple is the most sacred union, which is why this image is being used to symbolize the spiritual union between God and mankind. The poem presents the imagery of a gypsy face, of a royal gown [like an empress or a queen], the thought of being baptized again, this time a conscious choice → it’s like all her isotopies of meaning [isotopie di significato] were catalyzed in a single meaning that was represented the idea of being God’s bride. #461 A Wife — at daybreak I shall be — Sunrise — Hast thou a Flag for me? At Midnight, I am but a Maid, How short it takes to make a Bride — Then — Midnight, I have passed from thee Unto the East, and Victory — Midnight — Good Night! I hear them call, The Angels bustle in the Hall — Softly my Future climbs the Stair, I fumble at my Childhood's prayer So soon to be a Child no more — Eternity, I'm coming — Sire, Savior — I've seen the face — before! Content Analysis This poem relies on ambiguous metaphors too. Dickinson’s poetry consistently uses sunrise as a symbol of new life in paradise, of awe and wonder, and of love. The East is used in similar ways as a stand-in for paradise, but she has also used it to stand for victory and for passion. She explicitly links the East here with Victory. At midnight the speaker goes to bed, people wish her good night and as she retires, she can hear “Angels bustle in the Hall.” She stops to contemplate the situation & this goes back to the first stanza when she thinks about the magnitude of the change she is about to undergo from midnight to dawn. Midnight represents the moment of change: on one side a Maid; on the other, at daybreak, a Bride. MODULO C The Norton Anthology (1914-1945) + cap. 7 La letteratura degli Stati Uniti, C. Iuli – P. Loreto, appunti + slides. Contesto storico. The conflict known as World War I started in Europe in 1914, with Great Britain, France, and Russia fighting against Germany. The United States entered the war late in 1917 on the side of Britain and France, after having witnessed the Civil War end around fifty years before. In this interval, the country's industrial power had grown immensely and so had its major cities, which had been increasingly welcoming European immigrants on the Eastern seaboard and Asian immigrants on the West Coast. In 1914 the country's network of transcontinental railroads linked its productive farms, small towns and industry to urban centers. In 1908 Henry Ford had introduced the Ford Model T, transforming the idea of cars from an exotic luxury technology into a consumer good, and by 1912 an American [he was from Indiana] entrepreneur Carl G. Fisher had conceived the first transcontinental highway, formally opened on October 31, 1913. The Lincoln Highway’s full route originally ran through 13 states: New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, and California. Aviation pioneers were rapidly building on the Wright brothers' first successful powered airplane flights of 1903. Like the Civil War, World War I would: a. mobilize the country's industries and technologies; b. spur [stimolare, incitare] their development; c. uproot both soldiers and civilians. At the end of World War I, the United States was still a nation of small farms and small towns, with about two-thirds of its population living in rural districts. Despite the waves of immigration, the majority of Americans were still of English or German ancestry, and about one American in ten was of African descent. The majority was deeply distrustful of international politics, and after the war ended, many attempted to steer the nation back to prewar modes of life. ► In 1924 Congress enacted a sweeping exclusionary immigration act, which prohibited all Asian immigration and set quotas for other countries on the basis of their existing U.S. immigrant populations, intending thereby to control the ethnic makeup of the United States. The immediate postwar years also saw the so-called RED SCARE, when labor union headquarters were raided and immigrant radicals were deported by a government fearful of the influence of the Communist Soviet Union. Despite the government's restrictions on leftist political activity, many Americans, and among them writers and intellectuals as well as labor activists and immigrants, looked to the Soviet Union and the international Communist movement for a model in fighting. The *RED SCARE was a form of public hysteria provoked by fear of the rise of leftist ideologies in a society. The first occurred 1917 - 1920, due to an increase in organized labour movements and immigration. It was also fueled by the shared feeling of anxiety stemming from the Russian Revolution of 1917, in which Lenin’s Russian Social- Democratic Workers’ Party overthrew the Russian tsar and proved that a popular labour-led movement could successfully take over a government. Fears of a Bolshevik conspiracy to overthrow the United States government brought the U.S. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer to carry out a series of raids against foreign-born individuals who were accused of anarchist, communist, and radical leftist sympathies. The Palmer Raids, which were often brutal, drew increasing criticism from the public as they failed to produce evidence of a Bolshevik conspiracy. For other Americans, the war helped accelerate political and social changes. ▪ the struggle to win American women the vote ended in 1920 with the passage of the NINETEENTH AMENDMENT → “the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex”. ▪ The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, founded in 1909, successfully argued during World War I for the commissioning of black officers in the U.S. armed forces → as they would again after World War II, African Americans who fought abroad returned to fight for their rights at home. These conflicts acquired new urgency when the stock market crashed in 1929 and led to an economic depression with a 25% unemployment rate, a percentage even larger in its impact, by present-day standards, as women were not in the workforce. Known as the GREAT DEPRESSION, this period did not fully end until the United States entered World War II – the US was initially reluctant to enter it, until the Japanese attack on the American fleet at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. The war unified the country politically → it revitalized industry, which devoted itself to goods needed for the war; and put people to work, including women. Germany surrendered in the spring of 1945 and the war ended following 6 and 9 August 1945, when the United States detonated two atomic bombs over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki respectively. The bombings killed between 129,000 and 226,000 people, most of whom were civilians, and remain the only use of nuclear weapons in an armed conflict. After the war, Europe was in ruins and the United States had become the world’s major industrial and political power. American artists and thinkers are shocked by the terrible actualities of large-scale, modern war – they get a sense of a great civilization being destroyed or destroying itself, of a social breakdown and of an individual powerlessness – they feel fear and disorientation – the “modern temper” is born and the Thirties → they identified themselves with the WORLD’S WORKERS and wanted to give them the control of the means of production—something which also ran counter to traditional American beliefs in free enterprise and competition in the marketplace. A defining conflict between American ideals and American realities for writers of the 1920s was the SACCO-VANZETTI case. ► Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were Italian avowed anarchist immigrants, but not Communists; on April 1st 1920, they were arrested near Boston after a murder during a robbery and were accused, tried and condemned to death in 1921; it was widely believed that they had not received a fair trial and that their political beliefs had been held against them. After a number of appeals, they were executed in 1927, maintaining their innocence to the end. John Dos Passos and Katherine Anne Porter were among the many intellectuals who spoke in their defense; several were arrested and jailed. It’s estimated that over a hundred poems [including works by W.C. Williams, E. St. Vincent Millay, and C. Sandburg] along with six plays and eight novels of the time treated the incident from a sympathetic perspective. Like the Sacco-Vanzetti case in the 1920s, the SCOTTSBORO case in the 1930s brought many American writers and intellectuals, black and white, together – the struggle referred to racial bias in the justice system. In 1931 nine black youths were indicted in Scottsboro, Alabama, for the alleged rape of two white women in a railroad freight car. They were all found guilty, and some were sentenced to death. In a second trial, one of the alleged victims retracted her testimony; in 1937 charges against five of the defendants were dropped. But four went to jail, and many people view that as unfair. Communists were especially active in the Scottsboro defense; but people across the political spectrum saw the case as crucial to the question of whether black people could receive fair trials in the South. Technology played a vital but often invisible role in these events, as it linked places and spaces, contributing to the shaping of culture as a national phenomenon: ▪ ELECTRICITY FOR LIGHTS & APPLIANCES & THE TELEPHONE, 19th century inventions → improved life for many but contributed to widening the gap between those plugged into the new networks and those outside them. ▪ PHONOGRAPH & THE RECORD PLAYER & THE MOTION PICTURE & RADIO → brought mass popular culture into being, but also pushed many intellectuals to suspect that mass culture would create a robotic, passive population vulnerable to demagoguery. ▪ AUTOMOBILE → the most powerful innovation, however, the automobile, encouraged activity, not passivity. Along with work in automobile factories themselves, millions of other jobs-in steel mills, parts factories, highway construction and maintenance, gas stations, machine shops, roadside restaurants, motels etc. depended on the automobile. This is also a period of revolutionary cultural changes, with especially a great impact of the SCIENCES on the common way of thinking and on literature, but, at the same time, with many writers rejecting a purely scientific explanation of the world and the purely positivistic mentality that seemed to accompany 19th century enquiry. We witness: ✓ LOSS OF AUTHORITY of traditional, humanistic explanations of reality and of human life. ► reactions by Southern writers such as John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and major poets like Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens and W.C. Williams → art is portraited as unable to provide accounts of the things that matter, like subjective experience and moral issues. ✓ ART becomes the repository of a way of experiencing the world other than that offered by science → an alternative world view. Scientific discoveries that took place are: Albert Einstein’s theories of relativity (1905), Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, Neils Bohr’s quantum mechanics theories (1900), Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology, with its new way of considering the relation between the mind and phenomena. To sum up, at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th, scientists discovered that: a. the atom was not the smallest unit of matter & matter was not indestructible b. both time and space were relative to an observer’s position c. some phenomena were so small that attempts al measurement would alter them d. some outcomes could be predicted only in terms of statistical probability e. the universe might be infinite in size and yet infinitely expanding; ► hence, commonly known science had to be put aside in favor of modern theories → this resulted in scientists and literary intellectuals becoming less able to communicate with their worldviews diverging. Some of the discoveries caused a feeling of less certainty and blurring of the distinction between matter and energy, observer and observed, time and space, which also helped the spreading of theories such as Freud’s, with his Interpretation of Dreams (1900) — dreams are “censored”, “condensed” and “displaced” through “dream distortion” — and Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901). He had particular influence on Surrealism—a movement descended partly from Dada and proclaimed in 1924 (André Breton’s “Surrealist Manifesto”)—which is expressly Freudian, as it seeks truth by the suspension of reason and by making works of art conform to a logic only of dreams. The Great Depression was a worldwide phenomenon that led to the rise of fascist dictatorships in Europe – along with rearmament, threat of war, fall of France – including those of Francisco Franco in Spain, Benito Mussolini in ltaly, and Adolf Hitler in Germany, with his program to make Germany rich and strong by brutally conquering the rest of Europe, led inexorably to World War II. In the United States, the Depression made politics and economics the salient issues of public life. Free-enterprise capitalism had always justified itself by arguing that the system not only made a small number of individuals immensely wealthy, but also guaranteed better lives for all, but these theories now didn’t sound completely true – bankers and stockbrokers committed suicide, ordinary people lost their homes and jobs. Mass unemployment, financial failures, extreme poverty caused an enormous hardship, especially since most families had only one bread-winner and there was no help from welfare or social security benefits. ▪ Conservatives advised WAITING until things got better; ▪ Radicals espoused immediate SOCIAL REVOLUTION. The terrible economic situation in the United States produced a significant increase in Communist Party membership and prestige in the 1930s; many intellectuals allied themselves with its causes. An old radical journal, THE MASSES, later THE NEW MASSES, became the official literary voice of the party, and various other radical groups founded journals to represent their point of view. Visitors to the Soviet Union returned with positive reports about a true workers’ democracy and prosperity, which led the appeal of communism to be significantly enhanced and viewed as an opponent of fascism. When Josef Stalin, the Soviet dictator, establishes a series of brutal purges in the Soviet Union in 1936 and when in 1939 he signs a pact promising not to go to war against Germany, the disillusionment and betrayal felt by radicals will lead many left-wing activists to become ANTI-COMMUNISTS after World War II. In the Great Depression atmosphere, the election of FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT as president in 1932 was a victory for American pragmatism → his liberal reforms cushioned the worst effects of the Depression and avoided the civil strife (conflitto civile). His reforms reasoned on: ✓ social security; ✓ programs creating jobs in the public sector; the WPA*. ✓ welfare [financial or other aid provided by the government] ✓ unemployment insurance. THE WORKS PROGRESS ADMINISTRATION (WPA), was an American New Deal agency which employed millions of job-seekers – mostly men who were not formally educated – to carry out public works projects, including the construction of public buildings and roads. It was established on May 6, 1935, by presidential order, as a key part of the Second New Deal. It was the first major attempt at government patronage of the visual arts in the United States. In the fall of 1935 a range of creative, educational, research, and service projects was organized to preserve the skills of professional artists in mural, easel, sculpture, and graphic art divisions, of commercial artists in the poster and Index of American Design divisions, and of the less experienced in art education and technical jobs. In one of its most famous projects, Federal Project Number One, the WPA employed musicians, artists, writers, actors and directors in arts, drama, media, and literacy projects. The five projects dedicated to these were: ▪ the FEDERAL WRITERS’ PROJECT 1 (FWP) ▪ the HISTORICAL RECORDS SURVEY (HRS) → many former slaves in the South were interviewed; the documents are of great importance for American history. ▪ the FEDERAL THEATRE PROJECT (FTP) and the FEDERAL MUSIC PROJECT (FMP) → the groups toured throughout the United States, and gave more than 225,000 performances. ▪ the FEDERAL ART PROJECT (FAP). Archaeological investigations under the WPA were influential in the rediscovery of pre-Columbian Native American cultures, and the development of professional archaeology in the United States. Contesto letterario. People felt a growing alienation incompatible with Victorian morality, optimism, and convention. New ideas in psychology, philosophy, and political theory kindled a search for new 1 The FEDERAL WRITERS’ PROJECT was directed by Henry Alsberg and employed 6,686 writers at its peak in 1936. By January 1939, more than 275 major books and booklets had been published by the Federal Writers’ Project. Most famously, the FWP created the American Guide Series, which produced thorough guidebooks for every state that include descriptions of towns, waterways, historic sites, oral histories, photographs, and artwork. Additionally, another important part of this project was to record oral histories to create archives such as the Slave Narratives and collections of folklore. World War II would bring back prosperity by expanding industrial production. ▪ definition of image → that which presents an intellectual & emotional complex in an instant of time. ▪ poetry must be made of images, it should not narrate, it should not present a discourse → it has to show. This is why the poet should get rid of all the words that are not strictly necessary in order to present an image, an object. Ezra Pound, born on October 30, 1885 in Hailey, Idaho, U.S.; only child of a Federal Land Office official, he was an American poet and critic, a supremely discerning and energetic entrepreneur of the arts who did more than any other single figure to advance a “modern” movement in English and American literature. Pound promoted, and occasionally helped to shape, the work of such widely different poets and novelists as William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Robert Frost, D.H. Lawrence, and T.S. Eliot. His pro-Fascist broadcasts in Italy during World War II led to his postwar arrest and confinement until 1958. After two years at Cheltenham Military Academy, which he left without graduating, he attended a local high school. From there he went for two years (1901–03) to the University of Pennsylvania, where he met his lifelong friend, the poet William Carlos Williams. He took a Ph.B. (bachelor of philosophy) degree at Hamilton College. He left with a knowledge of Latin, Greek, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Provençal, and Anglo-Saxon, as well as of English literature and grammar. He spent twelve years in London, but soon, unsettled by the slaughter of World War I and the spirit of hopelessness he felt was pervading England after its conclusion, Pound decided to move to Paris, and later on, in England. In a Station of the Metro, Ezra Pound The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough. In this kind of poetry the title plays a PIVOTAL ROLE in understanding the context. In this particular poem, faces appear in front of the poet like petals on a black branch, probably a dimly lit metro platform → the semicolon [ ; ] suggests a simile. By juxtaposing these two very different images, the poem blurs the line between the speaker's reality and imagination and invites the reader to relate urban life to the natural world. Pound strips the poem of all superfluous language; including the title, the poem uses just 20 words—meaning there is nothing to focus on besides the pair of images and how they relate to each other. The assonance between ˓ crowd ˒ and ˓ bough ˒ contributes in the process of visualizing. The poem's title relays its exact setting: "In a Station of the Metro." By describing the setting in its title, the poem allows itself to be even more concise, sharing only the raw descriptions of images that arise from the speaker's mind while in this metro (that is, "subway") station. Though nothing within the poem itself makes this clear, Pound wrote "In a Station of the Metro" specifically about an experience he had in metro station in Paris in 1912. This particular setting, which is likely dimly lit and full of noise, contrasts with the poem's second and final line: "Petals on a wet, black bough." A short description of a part of the natural world does not seem to belong "in a station of the metro," and yet the poem's crux is about defying expectation through an odd pairing of images. The speaker seems lost in the crowd, and, for some reason, can only think of petals on a bough. By the turn of the century, modernism began to proliferate throughout all artistic fields into competing movements of artists fighting for the honor of being “the most avant of all the gardes”. European modernism had ended in the middle Twenties and included the great novels of Joseph Conrad, D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, and the best poetry of W.B. Yeats and Ezra Pound. We could say that it’s usually considered to be framed, chronologically and historically, between the two world wars of the 20th century. In literature, it’s marked by: o 1912 - ALFRED STIEGLITZ’s Camera Work publishes reproductions of paintings by Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, together with two “portraits” of their activity by GERTRUDE STEIN, which were presented as a parallel post-impressionist spirit in prose. - HARRIET MONROE starts Poetry Magazine in Chicago. o 1913 - Poetry publishes EZRA POUND’s imagist principles - STEIN’s Tender Buttons is published – short experimental prose poems. - the most important art exhibition in the history of American art is opened; the ARMORY SHOW (International Exhibition of Modern Art) introduced to the American public post- impressionism, cubism, expressionism and futurism; it caused an uproar [clamore]. o 1914 - The Camera Work publishes MINA LOY’s Aphorisms on Futurism. Imagist poems begin to be published in magazines. o 1913-14 - ROBERT FROST publishes his first 2 volumes of poems, A Boy’s Will and North of Boston o 1915 - EDGAR LEE MASTERS publishes The Spoon River Anthology o 1916 - CARL SANDBURG publishes The Chicago Poems o 1921 - MARIANNE MOORE, Poems o 1922 - T. S. ELIOT, The Waste Land o 1923 - WALLACE STEVENS, Harmonium (Sunday Morning) - E.E. CUMMINGS, Tulips and Chimneys (typographic experimentalism) o 1924 - MOORE, Observations THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE’S WORKS o 1922 - CLAUDE MCKAY, Harlem Shadows The Book of American Negro Poetry, ed. JAMES WELDON JOHNSON; he was a key figure of the Harlem Renaissance. Not only was he a distinguished lawyer and diplomat who served as executive secretary at NAACP [National Association for the Advancement of Colored People] for a decade, he was also a composer who wrote the lyrics for “Lift Every Voice and Sing” known as the Black national anthem. o 1925 - COUNTEE CULLEN, Color The New Negro, ed. ALAIN LOCKE; American educator, writer, and philosopher who promoted the recognition and respect of blacks by the total American community. Having studied African culture and traced its influences upon Western civilization, he urged black painters, sculptors, and musicians to look to African sources for identity and to discover materials and techniques for their work. o 1926 - LANGSTON HUGHES, The Weary Blues (poems based on blues and jazz rhythms) More narrowly, Modernism refers to work that represents the transformation of traditional society under the pressures of modernity, and that breaks down traditional literary forms in doing so. Much modernist literature of this kind, which critics increasingly now set apart as HIGH MODERNISM, is some sense antimodern → it interprets modernity as an experience of loss. T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, the great poem of high modernism, represents the modern world as a scene of ruin. High modernism is accepted shorthand for the core phase of European literary modernism in the 1920’s, meaning the literature produced by well-known great writers such as Eliot, Joyce, Pound, Woolf, Mann, Kafka, Proust, Gide, etc.; In a deeper sense, however, in the modernists' conception of poetry culminates the aesthetics formulated in Emerson in the Romantic era and already shot through, then, with a proto-pragmatic vein that William James and John Dewey would bring to light. It is an aesthetic founded on a conception of knowledge that is subjectivistic and oscillates between faith and skepticism; that focuses more on the advantages of man's willingness to believe than on his ability to assert absolute truths → art expresses it, deeply linked to their practical use in life. There’s coherence in the work written between the two World Wars that is related to historical pressures. In the most general terms, much serious literature written between 1914 and 1945 attempted to convey a VISION OF SOCIAL BREAKDOWN and saw the writer’s task as that of developing techniques to portray a society in decay. It distinguished itself from: ▪ literature written before World War I, which rose from a sense of society as something stable, and which believed that it could chronicle a universal human situation through an accurate representation of particulars (mimetic). ► writers before WW1 had faith in society and in art. ▪ literature written after World War II lacked the faith in its own power to reflect any reality, even a disintegrating one. ► writers lost even that sustaining faith in themselves, which had inspired modernists. ✓ The selected point of view is often that of a naive or marginal person, like a child or an outsider → the aim is to better convey the REALITY OF CONFUSION and dissent rather than the myth of certainty and consensus. ✓ In both poetry and fiction, modernists tended to emphasize the CONCRETE SENSORY IMAGE & detail over general statement && reliance on the reference to literary, historical, philosophical or religious details of the past; ✓ Allusions to literary, historical, philosophical, or religious details of the past keep company, in modernist works with VIGNETTES OF CONTEMPORARY LIFE, chunks of popular culture, dream imagery, and symbolism drawn from the author's private life experiences. TO SUM UP, the Modernist work: ▪ moves across time and space; ▪ shifts from the public to the personal; ▪ opens up literature as a field for every sort of concern, with materials previously considered “unliterary” & language previously thought of as “improper”; Huck Finn set the example. Modernism was in its turn attacked by the ever-growing industry of popular literature: tales of romance or adventure, historical novels, crime fiction and westerns become popular. On the other hand, serious writers were published as never before, especially by the so-called “LITTLE MAGAZINES”, magazines of small circulation that devoted to the publication of works for a small audience: o Poetry: A Magazine of Verse (1912, Harriet Monroe) o The Little Review (1914, Margaret Anderson) o The Seven Arts (1916) o The Dial (1917) o Broom (1921) o The Fugitive (1922) o Transition, Hound and Horn (1927) o The Crisis – “a quarterly journal of civil rights, history, politics and culture and seeks to educate and challenge its readers about issues that continue to plague African Americans and other communities of color” – (1910) o Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life (1923) Serious fiction and poetry were also published along with best-sellers like Gone with the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell by major publishers, such as: New Directions, Random House, Scribners and Harpers. o THE TRADITIONALISTS How is American modernism different from European modernism? Modernism in the US provoked two kinds of attitudes on the part of writers: a “pure” modernist and a traditionalist attitude → this is because a there was a tradition of regional writing which had developed in the country after the Civil War; many writers saw the modernist movement as running counter the American tradition, especially because such a great part of it was pessimistic, nostalgic, and conservative, while United States culture was by vocation progressive and dynamic. American modernists such as Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams must be thought of at the same time as both modernists and traditionalists, in the sense that they wanted to write what they called “American” works. o THE EXPATRIATES Despite the attempts to create a patriotic enterprise which aimed at developing a cultural life for the nation and embodying national values, the leading American exponents of pure modernism tended to be PERMANENT EXPATRIATES, such as Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, H.D., and T. S. Eliot. — these writers left the United States because they found the country lacking in a tradition of high culture and indifferent, if not actively hostile, to artistic achievement. In London – in the first two decades of the century and Paris during the 1920’s, where they found a vibrant community of dedicated artists and a society that respected them and their work and allowed them a great deal of personal freedom. Some American writers joined them for a period of time: Ernest Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, Francis Scott Fitzgerald, Archibald McLeish, Katherine Anne Porter, Robert Frost, Eugene O’Neill and Dorothy Parker. Production of works portraying this experience: ▪ Hemingway wrote Fiesta (UK, 1926) and The Sun Also Rises (US, 1927) ▪ Gertrude Stein wrote The Autobiography of Alice Toklas (1933) ▪ Kay Boyle and Robert McAlmon wrote Being Geniuses Together (1934, Paris, Contact Editions, with his wife Bryher) ▪ Malcom Cowley wrote Exiles’ Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s (includes his ▪ own personal narratives about his relationships with many of the best writers from the start of the century, 1934) Artists such as Marianne Moore and Wallace Stevens, which could be thought as pure modernists, stayed at home instead. o THE REGIONALISTS Other writers who came back and those who never left decided to identify with the American scene and to root their work in a specific region → they were either celebratory/nostalgic or critical of their own place of origins: ✓ THE MIDWEST - Carl Sandburg (Chicago poems) - Edgar Lee Masters (Illinois) - Sherwood Anderson (Winesburg, Ohio) - Willa Cather (also South-West) ✓ NEW ENGLAND - Edwin Arlington Robinson, Robert Frost. ✓ CALIFORNIA - Robinson Jeffers and John Steinbeck (Okies, Oklahoma sharecroppers; Dust Bowl). ✓ THE SOUTH, especially active despite its weak tradition until the Civil War. - Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee → a group of critics and poetscentered there and in 1929 came out with a manifesto called I’ll Take My Stand, which was a collection of essays advocating traditional southern values as an alternative to the social fragmentation of the urban North. These values were those produced by the former plantation civilization → grace, stability, leisure, ritual, hierarchy, a particular woman ideal – graceful, educated, virgin and then mother, angel-of-the-hearth, vulnerable and in need of protection by a patriarchy to which she is submitted. ► They were called SOUTHERN AGRARIANS. Among them are John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren. They wrote in an elegant, learned verse in which they tried to revivify the ideals of the past. - Ellen Glasgow → wrote about a South made up of cities and small farmers. - Thomas Wolfe → about an Appalachian South of hardy mountain people (b. - North Carolina). - Katherine Anne Porter → about her native Texas as a heterogeneous combination - of frontier, plantation and Latin cultures. - William Faulkner → a decaying, Deep South anguished by racial conflict. o THE NATIONALISTS Some writers wanted to speak for the whole nation. They take an American place and use it as a symbol and then expand it into a vision of the whole America, in line with Whitman: - John Dos Passos, USA (1930-36; 1938 the complete trilogy) – cinematic techniques - Hart Crane, The Bridge 1930 – symbolist technique - William Carlos William, Paterson 1940s – collage technique, myth - Crane and Williams, as Eliot and Pound before them, aim at writing the long American poem: going from a poetics of the fragment to a larger whole composed of unified fragments (mythically, symbolically) Many of the major writers of the period were women who were associated with all the important literary trends of the day: - Willa Cather, Ellen Glasgow, H.D., Marianne Moore, Katherine Anne Porter, Zora Neale Hurston. - Harriet Monroe → who established Poetry Magazine in Chicago in 1912 - Margaret Anderson → who founded The Little Review - Sylvia Beach → who ran “Shakespeare & Co.,” the left-bank Paris bookshop that became a gathering place for modernist writers - Dorothy Parker, Edna St. Vincent, Millay and Elinor Wylie → they wrote about women as women but were never feminist writers: they were more interested in personal expression. Although race as a subject potentially implicated all American writers, it was AFRICAN AMERICANS’ contribution that most differentiated American modernism from European. The numerous writers associated with the HARLEM RENAISSANCE made it impossible to think of a national literature without the work of black Americans.