poetry comparison

Description:
Write an essay on one of the following topics. Keep in mind that this is primarily a poetry assignment, and you are expect to not only to quote your evidence, but to analyze it in detail. For this reason, you should concentrate on one fairly brief example from each author and refer to other passages only insofar as they allow you to support or develop your argument. Please submit your essay as a PDF or Word file. We may not be able to open files in other formats.

You are free to invent your own topic for this paper as long as it involves comparing two authors at least one of whom is a poet. Originally topics must be submitted to your TA in writing or electronically at least one week before the due date.

1. Thoreau, Emerson and Whitman both address, directly or indirectly, what they take to be a crisis in the relationship between the citizen and his or her government. Compare Whitman to one of the two other authors on this issue and evaluate through close analysis the solutions, political and literary, each proposes.

2. Discuss the poet’s relation to nature in the work of two of the following three authors: Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson. What are the similarities and differences in their ideas about the relation between nature and poetic form? How are the differences related to differences in style?

3. Dickinson and Emerson extol solitude; Whitman is often a poet of the city and the crowd. Discuss the social and/or urban element in Whitman’s poetry in comparison to one of his contemporaries. Is Whitman"s sociality a rejection of Emersonian ideals or an extension of them?

4. Gender clearly informs the poetic personae that Whitman and Dickinson employ in their poetry: Whitman"s speaker can be aggressively and stereotypically masculine; Dickinson"s submissively and no less stereotypically feminine. Yet neither writer is consistent on this score (and both were atypical in real life). Dickinson"s speakers sometimes seem to refuse to submit to traditional social expectations for women, such as courtship and marriage. (Consider poem 409.) In poem 764, she famously compares herself to a gun. Whitman"s "I" refers to men and women alike as "lovers"; he seems as comfortable in the skin of a woman during sex as in that of a man. (See "The Sleepers, ll. 46-59.) Write a paper comparing the ways in which these two poets employ and/or defy gender norms, focusing primarily on one poem or passage from each. Do gender norms support or restrict their efforts, and how does each respond?