it's the end

I have really enjoyed the personal reflection aspects of this class and having an opportunity to sort of talk about success at CMU and what it means to succeed here and what it should mean to succeed here in a more open and revealing way. I think that I've learned a good deal about what I want and need to get out of my own personal experience here and I think that being in this class has helped me to try and strive more towards that personal picture of what my life here should be like rather than accepting the typical picture of Carnegie Mellon success, working until you can't work anymore.

That being said I am taking some academic sort of traditional knowledge out of this course as well, although I have learned a lot about myself over this past semester through this class I have also discovered some interesting aspects of 19th century literature. One thing that I hadn't quite understood about American literature during this time period was the sheer variety of genres available. For some reason I mostly thought of pamphlets, fliers, treatises and poetry as representing this century and not novels and short stories. When thinking of the 19th century as an era in American literature I tended to think of documents that surrounded major historical events like the Civil War rather than books that would have been read for pleasure. I was pleasantly surprised then to find myself reading Little Women, and just as surprised, if not quite as pleasantly, to discover Wide Wide World.

One thing that I would have liked from this class, and that maybe wasn't possible because of time or other constraints, would have been more information about the specific moment in time that received these works in the 19th century. Some of the author biographies, like Charlotte Perkins Gilman's especially, did a good job with this, but while we covered the general makeup of the society during the 19th century I sort of would have liked more specific information about the historical events surrounding each book, which might have lent more weight to how the books reflect transformative moments in the century.

Overall I think that the class was pretty cohesive and engaging. I enjoyed class discussions and especially the somewhat unconventional assignments, and found the class to be somewhat refreshing rather than stressful.

Last Post

I feel like I learned a lot from the course and I really enjoyed some of the new learning experiences we went through. I especially liked how we went on nature walks to better understand the subjects that we were learning. I definitely understand much more about the 19th century lifestyle compared to before. The subjects that we covered over the semester were things that I might have never encountered in my life had I not taken this course.

In the beginning of the course, I had no idea what Transcendentalism was. Not because I had never heard of it before, or because there weren’t any definitions of it on Wikipedia, but because I just didn’t understand what it was actually supposed to do. “A movement against the current state of culture and society” sounded extremely general and vague to me. However, as we learned more about it, I actually found it to be interesting. Even though only a small group of people were involved in the movement, it made a significant impact, which is very impressive. Also, the fact that each individual contribution to the movement was documented and mattered makes Transcendentalism that much more interesting. I also like the effect in had on a family level. For example, Amos Alcott’s involvement in Transcendentalism affected his daughter Louisa’s life and perhaps even shaped her into the writer and character that she was.

One of my favorite books that we read this semester was Little Women. Prior to the course, I had read it before and watched theater versions of it, but re-reading it after learning about the 19th century made it much more fun. Learning about what experiences shaped the author and how the larger social values affected an individual’s life made reading the book more interesting. I knew that the book was based on Alcott’s life, but I didn’t realize how closely it reflected her life. I read in the introduction of the book that most of the incidents depicted in Little Women were actual experiences that Alcott and her sisters went through. It made the story much more real.

UNTITLED By clare graziano

Spinning through the daze of purple

The haze of anger of anguish and confusion

A color that plagues my hopes with

A feeling of failure

Tears of hurt

Lost in zeros and zzz’s

Knowing the answer is

Refusal

Time for change

But as it continues to rain

I feel the time and place

Stray to permanent pieces of a frame.

Boxing in my moments and my shape

Lost in the words of no’s and can’ts

Rules that have lost their meanings

And purposes that are without

What to do and say when

Big puppy eyes demand answers

And the thoughts of when you could

Seem as old as the man on the corner

Money gone like Mondays

Trust like Tuesday s

But Wednesday never seems to come

Stagnate in the week

In the month in the year.

Its time for change

To cut way the abuse

The angry reality and

The men that defined a period

Saddest at the loneliest moments

Ready for enlightenment

A moment when the clouds open

And the sun shines in reason

When will it come will it be soon

Or like the winter is it here to stay

To remind me of the mistakes I

Have made

Breaths of snow of rain of hail

But the breath of green is the last one

I can take

I will wake

But know that soon I will break

The soul is gone

The heart is cracked

And all that is left are

The books

That holds up the stack of lists

The goals and dreams

The thoughts and ideas

That once made a girl

Just like me feel free.

Reflections

So my experience in the class has been an interesting one. In our discussions we talked a lot about the over-worked Carnegie Mellon student who desperately needs to take a break from his or her computer, put down the problem set, and venture into the woods to reconnect with nature. We talked about how there was a necessity for relaxation and reflection on this campus, and while I initially jumped to disagree (I am a extremely motivated person and take deep pride in my successes within the institution) I would have to argue, upon reflection, that this class succeeded in its goal.

No, while I am not the type of person to drop every thing for two hours to do “nothing” on the floor of my dorm room (with the exception of my weekly meditations—but I actually view those a productive [for my mental well-being perhaps]), and while it is debatable whether I will force myself to lessen my load of responsibilities anytime soon, something I was extremely thankful for regarding this class was the way in which it really was my three hours of relaxation in the week. This is not to suggest that we as students were given a lesser workload, but rather that the readings and assignments we were given were intellectually stimulating but at the same time not stressful or violently demanding. I came to class each day having not specifically planned topics for conversation, but instead, just allowing my ideas and comments to flow naturally into discussion.

This may seem crazy to you, but these are the things that I do on a daily basis.

I am an extremely anal person. Organization and reliability are everything to me and I hate letting down those who trust me with responsibility and their confidence. That being said, I have noticed that this class has been a refuge for me this year. In our classroom space I was able to escape my own obsessive tendencies (checking email every five minutes, writing down each word of a comment I feel the need to make in class before saying it, etc..)

So cheers to that, my friends. I may not have formed a best friendship with the Transcendentalists or Thoreau, but this class has definitely caused me to take a few deep breaths—and honestly, any progress is progress.

Final Blog Post

I'll admit that I was apprehensive about taking a class on 19th century literature. I wasn't sure how interesting literature written in 1800s could be. To my surprise I found that the themes found in many of the works we read our relevant to current culture and even my own life. I have thoroughly enjoyed the class...well with the exception of the poetry unit, largely because the structure was completely different than other classes I've taken at CMU. I tend to be pretty quiet in class, but in this course I fell compelled to participate in the discussion and it was a new experience to voice my interpretations of texts and bounce ideas off others.

Exposure to the Transcendental Movement was probably what I benefited most from this course. I knew very little about transcendentalists before reading Thoreau, but I learned was striking. It was incredible how such a small, interconnected group of people relentlessly advocated for change, particularly with the way man treats nature. The transcendentalists seemed to be so far ahead of their time and so in sync with the environmental argument today.

I'll definitely take a great deal away from this course. On a personal level I feel much more comfortable joining class discussions because of this class. I've also learned to examine texts in relation to the socio-cultural context of the time and how the time period and culture effects the text.

Why Did I Never Realize How Cool the 19th Century Was?

Before I took this class, I wasn’t aware of how much revolutionary social change took place during the 19^th century. That’s a little odd, because I knew that this was when the civil war happened and when the first wave of feminism began. Before reading the books for this class, however, I hadn’t connected the two movements in my head, learned about any other attempts at social change, like Transcendentalism, that took place during the 19^th century, or thought about the significance of the fact that several huge social movements began around the same time.

The readings for this class gave me a sense of how many people in the 19^th century not only wanted things to change, but pushed for that change through literature. Transcendentalists like Thoreau and Emerson wanted us to live in nature with more awareness so that we could learn to respect it and each other; Jacobs, Douglass, and countless other abolitionists wanted to see slavery end and tried to bring this about by showing that slaves are people, too; Charlotte Perkins Gilman demonstrated the dangers of the rest cure and tried to communicate that entrapping and limiting women only leads to suffering; Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson synthesized various parts of these statements and condensed them into poems.

Transcendentalism, Abolitionism, and Feminism are very diverse movements, but at base, I think they are all organized around similar principles. Each movement points to the essential humanity—and by extension the right to equal and decent treatment—of its members. I think this is true of Transcendentalism even thought it didn’t campaign for one specific group (though Thoreau was definitely anti-slavery). One of the things that I took away from Transcendentalist writing was the belief that we’re all equally capable of establishing our own relationships with God in our own individual ways. To me, this implies that we’re all equal, because we all have equal access to God and receive equal amounts of his love. This seems like a very powerful argument for respecting every one’s right to live the way they want to, and to abolish oppressive hierarchies.

I’ve always thought of the last half of the 20^th century, particularly the ‘60s, as the revolutionary moment in American history. And while it’s true that this was a period of huge social change, I think that the 19^th century was equally important. I also don’t think that the ‘60s could possibly have happened without the writers, artists, and political figures who started these 19^th century revolutions.

last blog post

I’m glad that I had the opportunity to take this course. I got to read Little Women – and I enjoyed it in spite of myself. Sure, Thoreau might not have been the popular guy in class, but he definitely had opinions, and he wasn’t afraid of who he was. I’m learning not to be so afraid of that, lately. Although I can’t credit Thoreau with my enlightenment, that is nonetheless my positive parting gift to him. And I think that if there is one thing I definitely want to take away from this class, it’s that I don’t have to rush things. I remember when the prospective students were in class, and Professor Newman was talking to the one girl’s father as I left the room about just enjoying the time that you have in college, that we were all “running toward” something, and that we’d see when we got there that it wasn’t what we thought it would be. Well, I have pretty much three weeks left in college. And I’ve noticed that I always start to miss things just as I realize that I’m not going to have them much longer. But I’m trying not to get too freaked out about what comes next, and just take one day at a time.

On another note, I also enjoyed reading Whitman and Dickinson, because I can’t say that I was overexposed to them in college or in high school. I really felt that the chosen poems were saying something that I needed or wanted to hear at this point. Our discussion about Dickinson on Monday really helped me see her poems in a different way too: I really liked Professor Newman’s description of Mother Goose, and I really hadn’t read her poems as so, so dark when I read them by myself – for whatever reason.

Eye opening...

This class was a little more unconventional than what I’m used to for a college-level English class, however I really enjoyed taking it. Because it had a completely different focus (not on essays or tests, but rather discussion and critical thinking), I feel like I learned so much more. The ability to just talk ad nauseum about poetry and novels was so refreshing from my other classes that had more rigorous schedules.

The assignments were definitely a nice change of pace – especially the walks. Although it was difficult to make the time for them every other day, I’m glad that I did them. They really relaxed me and allowed me to take a step back from my normal routine. I really only wish it had been warmer!

I completely agree with Emerson when he said:

“So shall we come to look at the world with new eyes. It shall answer the endless inquiry of the intellect, — What is truth? and of the affections, — What is good? by yielding itself passive to the educated Will. ... Build, therefore, your own world. As fast as you conform your life to the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold its great proportions. A correspondent revolution in things will attend the influx of the spirit.”

It is important to look at things with a new perspective. Seeing things the same way all the time gets boring, and it locks you into assumptions. It is essential to never assume anything in life – after all, nothing is ever certain besides death and taxes, right?

This class opened my eyes in a similar way. I was stuck assuming what a class was supposed to teach.

As for what I’m going to take away from this class...I guess everything that I learned in terms of critical thinking and analysis. I didn’t read anything new or groundbreaking, but the discussions our class had made up for that. Hearing my classmates’ opinions really opened my eyes.

Dream Warriors

This class has had quiet the impact on me over the term of the semester. It was during our walk exercise and journal entries that I found myself slipping back into a feeling of uneasiness and depression- in part of the endless winter and the other being somewhat bored within my major. These daily walks- which I try to squeeze in once a day have been crucial to me dealing with the stress from the semester. It was while taking these walks- sometimes with friends- other times, alone- that I began to discover new places around Pittsburgh and began to feel a bit less stir crazy. I began to get envious of writers like Thoreau, who left everything behind for a certain point, and just be content with living without any specific routine for the day. Along with the walks and reading works from the transcendentalists, the smothering feeling started to fade away and I quickly found myself in complete wanderlust.

Recently, a good friend of mine- who I have not talked to since our senior year in high school, when his mother died- called me when he was spending another night up, catching only and hour or two of sleep in Amsterdam. He told me stories of how he had taken a semester off from Columbia University, sold the majority of his belongings and bought tickets to five different countries. It was on the plane ride to Spain that he met this Botanist who offered him endless travels and adventures in exchange for his labor to discover plants lost in the four corners of the world. With that, he followed the Botanist to Uganda, and later spent some time with a tribe on a small South Pacific Island and discovered a rare cabbage- which he later presented in Amsterdam. It was through the more detailed stories, that I found myself wanting to hear the syllables of foreign tongues cluck against my ear, and made me take out a map of the world and I studied the lines, marking webs of the countries where he had been in the past six months. This phone call, and our conversations that lead up to this moment have had an enormous impact to me over the past two months. He called me three weeks ago when he was waiting at the airport to spend a month in Ethiopia, and then another month or two traveling deep in the dark jungles of the Congo, containers tucked in bags- full of plants whose names my tongue can’t bend to say. Somewhere in our nightly conversation he asked me if I would go traveling with him this summer, possibly throughout India, or perhaps, in certain regions of South America. Without a moment of hesitation I agreed and that night I couldn’t sleep from the excitement of being a traveler again. Three days later I got a phone call from an unknown NY number and was surprised when I picked up and heard my friend’s voice- only 376 miles away. For once both of us in the same time zone. He said he couldn’t travel alone anymore and he was waiting for me to finish school, so we could decide where we would go and travel and write (both of us are writers) for a few months, renting cheap rooms and practicing to roll our R’s without sounding as if we have shards of glass in our mouths, or learn how to meditate- and maybe transcend- quietly in a village in the Northern parts of India. Or we may just walk in the crowded streets, sucking on cocoa leaves and just wander around with no maps tucked in thinned pockets, like dream warriors…leaving a little part of us- a hair strand, a murmur, or an embrace in India or Peru.

The field notes scribbled down in the bitter months of a Pittsburgh Spring for this course has prompted me to extend the project and capture every little moments during this summers travels, which may well continue on throughout different seasons when I come back.

Some Thoughts

Of the poems that were picked for class I think that I like “I Had a Guinea Golden” the best. The poem has a couple of very well captured images, which is something that Emily Dickinson is famous for, but it also has a sort of cynicism and well meaning malevolence. The lines “And he no consolation Beneath the sun may find.” are a little malevolent in that they exhibit some desire for harm on the author's part, but at the same time it is a harm intended to bring the wayward friend home to her again. I think that this could be seen as a sentimental womanly poem, if only because the job of keeping a family together and friends moral is a woman's job. We get a sense that the friend has done something bad (he is a “traitor”) but whether he has committed some moral transgression or his crime was leaving her we are not sure.

I think that the poem really speaks to the universal feeling of losing a friend or feeling abandoned by a friend and wishing that they miss you too, or at least that they should be reminded of your existence. This is another thing that Dickinson accomplishes with many of her poems, this sort of window into the common soul. I think that this contrasts well with Whitman, because while he was attempting to paint a picture of the American spirit through the portrayal of every voice, Dickinson does it through the portrayal of her very own personal soul. I like this way better, and it comes off as less intrusive and more real. The fact that Dickinson is not trying to speak for people she is not, the bricklayer, the mason, the slave, makes her poetry more believable, and the fact that we may have felt the same way before makes it universally relatable.

The poems “Emancipation” and “Escape” could be held up as counterexamples, but I still believe that Emily Dickinson is the narrator here. Since we just read the slave narratives it is easy to forget that the state of women's rights during this time was pretty bad as far as politics and equality were concerned (although it wasn't anything as bad as the situation of slavery-I'm not suggesting that). The political inequality would be one that Dickinson would have felt pretty strongly considering that many of the men in her family were politicians.

One thing I noticed about Emily Dickinson’s poems was that they were very dark. A lot of the poems contained the theme of loss. Looking at her biography, it was not difficult to understand why. Dickinson had to suffer through the death of many family and friends throughout her life.

I couldn’t find the publication date for the poem “I Never Lost as Much but Twice”, but I thought it could have been written around the point where Dickinson had lost two people in her life. I thought this was a very striking poem. The line, “Twice have I stood a beggar before the door of God” perfectly describes the way one would feel at the brink of losing a loved one. When a person is desperate, they beg before a higher being to help them. However, their wish is not always granted. “Burglar, banker, father” is what she must have thought of God. I read some opinions that stated that this poem was influenced by the story of Job from the Bible. Job was the only figure in the Bible to have everything taken from him when he did nothing wrong. I think the comparisons were drawn because this is what Dickinson must have felt about the loss of her loved ones.

“Success is Counted Sweetest” is also one of the poems I liked. The poem was written in 1859, and I thought it was interesting that it used war imagery. Dickinson explains the importance of success in the form of a soldier dying in battle. This imagery was probably influenced by the Civil War. I thought this poem represented well the way people think. We tend to value more the things that are out of our reach. When we gain them, it is “sweet”, as Dickinson describes it. I can recall times in my life when I failed multiple times before achieving what I wanted. Those felt more valuable than when success just came to me easily. On the other hand, I was also saddened for the soldier in the poem. He realizes just how valuable victory is because he is dying as a result of his army’s defeat. His failure cost him his life and he will never get the chance to achieve success. However, unlike most people, who get a chance to bounce back, his life will end with his failure. For Dickinson, even a poem that reflects on a life lesson ends on a depressing note, death. From her writings, I can easily guess how the death of her loved ones affected her.

Success and Dickinson

So far in class we have talked a lot about what it means to succeed; what the definition of ‘success’ is at Carnegie Mellon, what the definition of ‘success’ is in the real world, what it means to be successful and whether or not your own personal definition of success is one that compromises your happiness, etc. In her poetry, it seems as if Emily Dickinson rides the same train of thought that the transcendentalists did when they considered the notion of success.

In her poem “SUCCESS IS COUNTED SWEETEST,” Dickinson writes “Success is counted sweetest / By those who ne’er succeed. / To comprehend a nectar / Requires sorest need.” Although we as a class were notified before reading the poems that there were several common topics between the readings we have read so far this year and the issues tackled by Dickinson in her poems, I was startled by the similarities between Dickinson’s concept of ‘success’ and how easily it aligned with those of the transcendentalists. In this first stanza, Dickinson points out that those who seldom succeed are often the people who appreciate success the most. This, on it’s own, is a largely uncontroversial idea. In the second half of the stanza, however, Dickinson argues that in order to truly comprehend and appreciate something like success (a feeling that is positive but largely overlooked) their needs to be demand. I saw this as an idea that was largely transcendentalists. The transcendalists themselves, for example, are people who recognized a need for the appreciation and reverence of nature. Because of this, they were moved into action. Looking back to the various discussions we had about success at Carnegie Mellon, Dickinsons’ points make perfect sense; students like us, who are overworked everyday, have difficultly acknowledging and appreciating our personal successes. It is expected that we received good grades or earn ourselves professional positions, so expected that we often lose our success in frequency and fail to appreciate it when it comes.

In the second stanza, Dickinson writes “Not one of all the purple host / Who took the flag to-day / Can tell the definition, so clear, of victory”. Here it seems as if Dickinson is referring to winners on a playing field with the term ‘purple host’ and the essence of victory. This sentence continues into the third stanza where Dickinson writes “As he, defeated, dying, / On whose forbidden ear / The distant strains of triumph. / Break, agonized and clear”. Here, Dickinson is saying that the winners of the game will never truly understand their triumph, or at least not as well at the losers will. Unlike the winners, he losers will still have the desire to try, to work harder, to truly succeed by inward improvement. This to me was somewhat transcendentalist. The idea that truly winning is achieved through suffering a defeat and working harder is similar to the idea that we better society by removing ourselves and critiquing it.

Poetry and its distribution..and more

After reading the Dickinson poems for class tomorrow, I did not feel as I did after the Whitman poems we read. For me, reading the Dickinson poems was less relatable and something that I found myself rather disinterested in. This may be because this week is the most stressful for me in terms of school, because today is Easter Sunday and I just spent the weekend at home with family, or because I am just simply not a poem person! Either way, the Whitman poems gave me a different view on poetry. It showed me that not all poems have to rhyme or have a particular form and that they can be historic as well as imaginative. While reading the Dickinson poems, I did not feel the same way. Here, I felt the subjects were not as in tune with me or my feelings. I felt they merely skimmed the surface of certain topics rather than going into detail. I do not know much about Dickinson and she may have other poems that do actually fit those descriptions, but I do not believe that was seen here.

Another thing that surprised me after finishing with Whitman was the length of poems. Hers were fairly short, especially in comparison to Whitman. It also reminded me of the length of poem we would read when in elementary school. The poems seemed to be short, perfectly rhyming and about simple subjects (not implying that these are!). Now I am starting to question the way poetry is taught in our country, if at all. There are so many people who write and love poetry, but does all of it get circulated as widely as it should? Do poets get their due? I honestly think there are many people who consider themselves good poets, who are not. However, I think there are many poets that also do not get the respect they deserve or get read enough. I do not know how this can be changed, but it seems to be a problem with literature in general as well. Personally, this class has raised my awareness about the seemingly shrinking world of literature. This could just be because I have not read a lot myself and the people in my field only read academic articles, magazines or books. I have a hard time reading while in school because I cannot invest myself fully while also dedicating myself to school, but I do believe that once I am done with school I will become an avid reader once again.

I am not sure how I got so far from the original topic of poetry, but through this semester these thoughts have come to mind and since we are winding down, I thought now would be a good time to share them!

Dickinson

I appreciated the poem at the beginning of your e-mail! I’ve read a little bit of Dickinson before, in a poetry class here, and I even tried to write a poem like one of hers – although it definitely wasn’t one of my best. My favorite poem here was definitely the last one, “Hope.” I loved the image of the bird; I loved the first line, “Hope is the thing with feathers.” It just made it seem so delicate. And that the image of the bird to allude to hope is something that is probably overdone at the this point, reminded me of something we talked about in class on Wednesday – that things may seem overdone now, but at the time of their creation, they were fresh and new. (This also relates to your Adaptations class!)

I liked this poem best because it speaks to how I’ve always felt; yes, there are times when I feel like I have no hope, but it keeps coming back. It “[…] sings the tune – without the words/And never stops at all” (lines 3 & 4). I could quote the whole poem; I just really like how she portrays hope as this thing that can’t be beaten, and I really like that she says, “Yet never, in extremity,/It asked a crumb of me (11-12). It’s true; you don’t have to do anything to have it. It’s just kind of inside you. If you want to believe in yourself, or hope for your dreams, it’s going to be there – maybe in spite of what you’re thinking; you can say that you give up on something, but if you wait things out, you’ll find a reason to have hope again. This actually reminds me of a quote that I put in one of my journal entries (that I found in my assignment book): “When you get into a tight place and everything goes against you till it seems you could not hold on a minute longer, never give up then for that is just the place and time that the tide will turn.”

The Cathedral of Woods

WHO ROBBED THE WOODS

*by: Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)*


WHO robbed the woods,

The trusting woods?

The unsuspecting trees

Brought out their burrs and mosses

His fantasy to please.

He scanned their trinkets, curious,

He grasped, he bore away.

What will the solemn hemlock,

What will the fir-tree say?
After having read, “Who Robbed The Woods” by Emily Dickenson, I immediately thought about the Transcendentalists from a few months ago. I recall having been moved by a Thoreau passage where he describes the woods as a cathedral or simply a worship place, and was in awe with how respectful he was to the natural world. Although I wasn’t Thoreau’s biggest fan, I admire how progressive he was, in regards to his relationship ad respect to the natural world, especially in a time where society was moving towards industrialization and disregarded the natural recourses. This poem, although short is a very potent and direct one, Dickinson demands who ruined the woods, who take away the moss away, how could someone simply strip away the resources from this pristine and mystical natural cathedral. Dickinson, like many of the transcendentalists who lived in the more utopian-like communities had a unique appreciation for the nature that surrounded them- this often was lost in the later words we read in the class- so reading this poem was a nice way to come back to the transcendentalists that we read. I chose this particular poem because of how loud it is, in comparison to the other poems. Dickinson immediately demands justice for this disrespect for mother Earth, with a bold stylistic choice of capitalization, she then continues to push the question further on. It is this first question that drives the poem through, and when the reader reaches the end, one cannot be a bit but overwhelmed by the weight she puts on the reader. I find it difficult to be moved by Dickinson in general, but it is within this poem that I was terribly stirred by how powerful this poem was.
In part, the beauty and simplicity of the piece reminded me of Barry Lopez, a writer and an advocate of nature who stresses the importance of one being aware of our surrounding, to become seduced by it’s purity and even, imperfections, become a slave to its beauty. Through “Who Robbed the Woods,” she rattles her reader to be aware, and reject the notion of accepting society stripping the woods of its resources. Very vibrant poem that stays grounded and promotes a certain degree of urgency in the reader.

Dickinson vs. Thoreau

When I was reading through the selection of Emily Dickinson poems, I was struck by how much “I Had a Guinea Golden” reminded me of this Thoreau quote: “I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle-dove, and am still on their trail. Many are the travelers I have spoken concerning them, describing their tricks and what calls they answered to….and they seemed as anxious to recover them as if they had lsot them themselves.” I liked the Thoreau quote because it recognized that most people share a certain amount of common experiences, like loss. Thoreau was hard for me to relate to because he was so egotistical and unsympathetic to the circumstances of others, but sometimes he hit on real gems, and that quote was one of them. At his best, Thoreau articulates universal human experiences, like loss and the desire for freedom, beautifully.

Emily Dickinson’s writing also articulates these things. So many of her poems hit on essential truths. “There’s a Certain Slant of Light,” “Emancipation,” “Escape,” “I’m Nobody!,” “Pain,” and “Hope is the Thing with Feathers” all stood out to me because they addressed things I’d felt myself very acutely at one point or another. I’d read “I’m Nobody!” (I think everyone’s read that one) and “Hope is the Thing with Feathers” before and I have both of them semi-memorized.

The thing I find most remarkable about Emily Dickinson is that she spent so much of her life hiding from other people, yet she seemed to understand and sympathize with them so well. While Thoreau also went out of his way to avoid people, I think the difference between them lies in the fact that Emily Dickinson seems to love and sympathize with people, while Thoreau tends to look down on anyone who doesn’t make the choices he has made. Maybe the difference is that Emily Dickinson was able to separate humanity from civilization. I got the impression that Thoreau thought that society was bad because people are bad (since people construct society), and that was why he wanted to avoid them as much as possible. I think Dickinson also thought society was bad. She once told her niece that the moment she locked the door to her bedroom, she was free. But Dickinson’s writing makes me think that she also believed people were essentially the same at base, and therefore redeemable: if we all share common experience, then we all have the potential to see ourselves in each other and be good to each other. This is also what Whitman, Jacobs, Douglass, Perkins Gilman, and Alcott say in one way or another in their books. At least in the 19^th century writing we’ve read in this class, there is a very strong strain of writers reminding us that just being alive and on earth entitles us to respect and kindness. By reminding us that we all share a common experience, they encourage us to treat each other better.

Loss and Marriage

From the little I knew about Emily Dickenson from high school classes, she was a woman who lived a very isolated existence and her poems often contain morbid themes. Comparing Whitman to Dickenson would be an interesting subject considering how different these two poets chose to live their lives, although they were contemporaries of each other. While Whitman chose to travel the country and observe all aspects of life and culture that surrounded him, while Dickenson was a recluse experiencing much less of the world than United States. It seems that the themes that each chose to write in their poems contrast greatly, Whitman celebrates the beauty in everything he encounters, while Dickenson focuses on the morbid, depressing events in life.

I was surprised by the theme of loss and escape in several of the poems. I really enjoyed the poem, “I Had a Guinea Golden” even though it was a little depressing. The poem brought back the themes featured in transcendental works about nature and freedom. I cannot pinpoint why I enjoyed it but I did.

What I found very interesting was her poem, “The Wife”, I’m not sure if her intention was to provide a commentary on the roles of women and the institution of marriage, but it seemed that way. She seems very critical of the role a wife is supposed to take on once she is married. She notes that a wife is supposed to give up her “playthings”, meaning that a woman is expected to give up her own work, hopes, and desires, to take “honorable work” of being a wife and mother. Emily Dickenson never married, I’m not sure if this was her reason or the fact the she was somewhat of a hermit prevented her from marrying. I’m sure Emily Dickenson wouldn’t be the prolific poet that she is today had she taken on the more conventional route of mother and wife.

Hope Doesn't Discriminate

“Hope is the thing with feathers

That perches in the soul…

I've heard it in the chillest land, And on the strangest sea;

Yet, never, in extremity,

It asked a crumb of me.”

I thought I was mostly familiar with Emily Dickinson since I read her poetry in middle and high school. I even once visited her quaint house in Amherst one summer and tried to embrace her sequestered lifestyle. However, I never did hold the opinion she was a hysterical hermit. When I visited her house during an informal tour, I saw that she used to lower cookies and hand-made articles of clothing in a basket from her window to children that would wait below in her yard. Thus I could understand that she enjoyed and felt comfortable with her solitary nature. Personally, I know I’ve lived a somewhat secluded life at CMU these past three years (obviously nothing as extreme as how Dickinson lived) so I think I can somewhat relate to observing the immediate outside world with both simple praise and common disregard. Although I do want to think that, as a white, male college student from an upper-middle class background, I certainly do not face the same adversity that she must have. Not to say that Dickinson’s adversity is what defines her; it’s just more of personal acknowledgment.

I’ve still always had a hard, but interesting time connecting Dickinson’s writing with her life story. Whether it was because I was younger or wasn’t presented with enough research, I simply didn’t find the connections between her life experiences and the connection to her poetry (except for, of course, the theme of death). This was until I read about Dickinson’s experience at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, where she was asked if she wanted to be a Christian. The courage that willed Dickinson and some of her other classmates to remain seated is remarkable.

I thought “Hope” had a special connection to this episode in her life. I especially enjoyed how Dickinson views hope as a secular feeling that can be bestowed on anyone, regardless of their religious convictions. Dickinson depicts hope as a small, but resilient bird whose song of joy cannot be quieted by larger and darker forces. The last two lines of the poem “Yet, never, in extremity, It asked a crumb of me” I think especially relate to her Mount Holyoke experience because of the three categories students were divided into (“established Christians,” those who “expressed hope,” and those who were “without hope.”) In a sense, hope, like Christianity, cannot ask you if you have a place for it in your soul. To my understanding, both are things you have to willingly allow into your life for them to have a meaningful and genuine impact. Proselytizers that want to gain followers and create enemies in the process usually pose such extreme questions. Obviously, it would be unfair to call Dickinson “godless” when she merely desired to experience some separation from patriarchal institutions.

I once had the same experience as Dickinson, except thankfully it wasn’t at school. I once attended an Evangelist revival out of juvenile curiosity. Toward the end of the service, after a slew of god-fearing speeches and chants against sinners, the minster asked everyone who wanted to be saved to stand. Nearly everyone in the auditorium took to their feet, except my mother and I (sadly, my little brother felt overcome by the pressure and he decided to stand as well).

Thoughts on Two Poems

Thoughts on Two Poems

I'm Nobody!
by: Emily Dickinson(1830-1886)

I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there 's a pair of us -- don't tell!
They 'd banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!

This poem reminds me of Yellow Wallpaper. This is especially true with the first stanza. It is easy to imagine the narrator of that short story have a conversation with the shadow lady that sounded much like the first stanza. The lines have a slightly batty undertone, essentially obvious that the speaker is losing their mind. The image of Dickinson living alone and writing makes the most sense in this poem. The sense of anonymity that exists in this poem is quite remarkable. I am curious to know whether or not Dickinson’s isolation led to this type of thought. I think this second stanza is speaking about the type of performance we do every day to just survive. I really like the image of image of a frog singing to his public. However, frogs do not croak because they want to but because they need to, it’s natural. This poem emphasizes the exhaustion that cultural façades may cause on some people. Thoreau would agree that high culture is exhausting and unnecessary. Although Dickinson may agree that upholding a façade is exhausting/dreary, using frogs to display this implies that this is a natural necessary exhaustion, with no choice. I’m not sure my analysis aligns with the transcendental school of thought, but I find it very interesting.



WHO ROBBED THE WOODS

*by: Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)*


WHO robbed the woods,

The trusting woods?

The unsuspecting trees

Brought out their burrs and mosses

His fantasy to please.

He scanned their trinkets, curious,

He grasped, he bore away.

What will the solemn hemlock,

What will the fir-tree say?

There are two answers to this robbing questions, Thoreau (and essentially all the Transcendentalists) and Oil companies/ Capitalism. My second answer seems quite silly, but I will address that later. The transcendentalists robbed the woods of their anonymity. Thoreau lived off the land and took in their beauty daily and lived among the trees. Most of the poem is actually a passive version of robbery. “Scanning” is not necessarily the most violent form, the form of robbery does not become tangible until the line “He grasped, he bore away” (Dickinson). The transcendentalists preached becoming “one with nature” and truly absorbing all if its beauty (I’m thinking of Emerson throughout Nature). So, the transcendentalist robbed nature of its peace and stillness for their own personal philosophical growth. However, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Despite using the wood for shelter and using the land to grow food, the transcendentalists did not do much damage to the land on a big scale. People who do cause a lot of damage to nature are the second answer to this question. I believe the green movement could turn this into a protest/ “fight” song for their movement. The poem personifies the woods/nature making the trees sympathetic. Those who rob the woods are those who take advantage of all nature for material goods and selfish needs, unlike the transcendentalist. These are the real robbers. Thinking of the robbers as deforesters or factory owners makes this a very solemn poem.

It is interesting to relate Dickinson to the other works we have read throughout the semester. I think the only reason I am making these connection is because of the focus on the transcendental and their significance during the 19th century. I think reading transcendentalist works has opened me up to new trains of thought that have made life a bit more interesting and the simplest poems a bit more complex.

Could she escape seclusion?

"I never hear the word "escape" / Without a quicker blood, / A sudden expectation, / A flying attitude. / I never hear of prisons broad / By soldiers battered down, / But I tug childish at my bars, -- / Only to fail again!"

At first, I really liked the poem Escape by Dickinson. I think it relates well to what we discussed throughout the year during classes. It touches on the importance of freedom and the difficulties of finding such freedom in everyday life, no matter your situation. Thoreau, Douglass, Whitman, and Alcott all found freedom to be essential in their writings. It is a key aspect in each of their pieces, despite the range of genres. Her poem, Emancipation, has similar themes:

"The eagle of his nest / No easier divest / And gain the sky, / Than mayest thou, / Except thyself may be / Thine enemy; / Captivity is consciousness, / So's liberty."

These two poems both tell a story of entrapment, making the reader believe Dickinson is being captured and held. This is why, after some thought, I started to dislike these poems (only a little though – Dickinson is one of my favorites).

Dickinson was a shut-in. She secluded herself from the world voluntarily. According to a biography of Dickinson, “Because of her discomfort and shyness in social situations, Emily gradually reduced her social contacts, going out less and less into society. By her late twenties, this has led to an almost complete seclusion; spending most of her time in the family house, rarely meeting others from outside a close family circle. Her sister explains this wasn’t a sudden decision, but a gradual process that happened over a period of time.”

Although her seclusion probably allowed her to write freely and made her poems as beautiful and heart-wrenching as they are, I think it’s a stretch for her to write about freeing herself when she is physically secluded. Moreover, she describes the world in other poems with frightening accuracy and it seems as though she desires to travel across the globe in her writing. I understand her shyness, but she seems to want to get out of her house so badly. I find it silly that she writes about escape and freedom when she can’t even free herself from her social ineptitudes and travel the world.

I’d read Dickinson before, as I mentioned she’s one of my favorites, but I’d never read these two poems in particular. They make me see her in a different light; before I pictured her as this crazy genius with frazzled hair, locked up in her bedroom, and having papers scattered across the floor...but now, I see her as so much more docile and weak (plus no more frazzled hair).

To a Pupil, I Hear It Was Charged Against Me

I'll admit, I'm not one for poetry. I've done my best to avoid taking any class that covers poetry, but it seems my luck has run out. However, I do find poetry interesting at times, especially when I can understand it. Whitman was an interesting read for me, particularly because I am not that familiar with his work. At first it seemed like Whitman's poems were just a bunch of non-sequitur thoughts all placed together in one book, but I remembered Whitman wrote about everything he saw and thought, so I suppose to him his poems are arranged in some type of order.

The message in To A Pupil really resonated with me. Whitman writes, the greater change you are trying to achieve, the more of yourself or "personality" you will have to invest into your cause. He speaks of commanding a room with presence, something I'm sure he accomplished with is almost 6 foot frame, which was tall for the time. I thought that all history-making leaders, whether good or bad, all had some form of charisma and presence. Whitman insists that the pupil must give up everything to "rest not" until he has created this Personality. This stuck with me, not because I'm trying to change the world, but because to attain something you want you have to invest all of yourself to achieve it. I'm assuming this resonated with me because the closer I get to senior year, the more nervous I become about finding that "perfect" job after graduation, which I will probably have to start searching for in a few months.

Whitman's message in To A Pupil reminded me of I Hear It Was Charged Against Me. It seems like his stances in these two poems are extremely contradictory, in To a Pupil he advocates for reform and improving upon one's personality; while in I Heard It Was Charged Against Me he insists that his intentions are not to destroy institutions or disturb the status quo, but leave a legacy of brotherhood. Whitman confuses me a bit, although it seems as if he accepts his contradictions. Whitman was a progressive man for his time, he recognized the injustices in society, but as far as I know, doesn't do much to solve these problems. It seems as if he uses his writing to call others to action.

I Sing the Body Electric

For me, it is difficult to understand poetry without prior research. The language feels so abstract to me that even after reading over it a couple of times, I don’t really understand it. Particularly the poems that I find difficult are the ones depict images or capture a fleeting moment. Perhaps this is because I am always looking for a storyline. That is why I looked up some stuff about Walt Whitman and Leaves of Grass, before I actually read the poems. I knew I would be able to appreciate them better if I knew what I was reading and looking for beforehand. What I found interesting in my research was that Whitman praised the body and the material world in a time when such appreciation was frowned upon. I decided to look for such signs when reading his poetry.

I found the poem I Sing the Body Electric really interesting. Nowadays, it isn’t difficult to find poems that describe and worship the human body. However, I can imagine why such a poem would be new and shocking at Whitman’s time.

“And if the body does not do fully as much as the soul? And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul?” The connections Whitman drew between body and soul must have been revolutionary. He brought into the contemporary society the idea that body and soul are connected. In this particular poem, he goes a step further and equates the body to the soul and his focus in the poem is praise of the body.

He is also upfront about sexual desires, which were oppressed at the time. When describing women’s physicality he states: “Hair, bosom, hips, bend of legs, negligent falling hands all diffused, mine too diffused, Ebb stung by the flow and flow stung by the ebb, love-flesh swelling and deliciously aching, Limitless limpid jets of love hot and enormous, quivering jelly of love, white-blow and delirious nice…” Maybe the language seems not at all explicit to us, but at the time it must have been considered obscene. I’m not surprised that there were some people who attempted to censor Whitman’s work. They were not ready to accept such an honest depiction of human nature and physicality.

I am still not sure if I truly enjoy reading poetry, but I do find it interesting to see the ideas that the pieces conveyed and how the contemporary audience responded to them. Also, I like seeing how Whitman uses language so deliberately. I feel that I have been able to learn a lot through his work.

A Noiseless Patient Spider

  A noiseless patient spider,   I mark'd where on a little promontory it stood isolated,   Mark'd how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,   It launch'd forth filament, filament, filament out of itself,   Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.    And you O my soul where you stand,   Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,   Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to       connect them,   Till the bridge you will need be form'd, till the ductile anchor hold,   Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.

The idea of a soul making connections is a really interesting in. When I was little I read a book that said that some Native American tribes didn’t allow photography because each photo is like taking a piece of your soul way. So the idea in reverse that once you meet someone and you become friends then you give the a piece of your soul and in turn they give you a piece of theirs. This trade makes each of the individuals involved better makes them stronger and happier and made up of better pieces.

But what happens when you end a friendship? When two people cared about each other and then they break that tie the both loses their pieces so rather then trading a piece they lose it all together make each person less of whole less of a real human soul.

This image makes sense to me, cause I feel that happens all the time to me that I get small pieces back from great friends but more offend then not I lose pieces of myself to those who cast me aside as they do. I wish I could string them back together.

           

To a Pupil

To a Pupil

  Is reform needed? is it through you?
  The greater the reform needed, the greater the Personality you need
      to accomplish it.

  You! do you not see how it would serve to have eyes, blood,
      complexion, clean and sweet?
  Do you not see how it would serve to have such a body and soul that
      when you enter the crowd an atmosphere of desire and command
      enters with you, and every one is impress'd with your Personality?

  O the magnet! the flesh over and over!
  Go, dear friend, if need be give up all else, and commence to-day to
      inure yourself to pluck, reality, self-esteem, definiteness,
      elevatedness,
  Rest not till you rivet and publish yourself of your own Personality.

My response to this poem may not be your conventional one it may not fit in a box and be perfect and seamless but this carnival I have learned a lot and the only thing that is seamless now a days are bullets. It was not a good carnival, it actually sucked. I had been on a downward spiral this year feeling like the joyous soul I once had am lost. A semester of proving myself over and over again the anger one feels when you can never win when there is no right answer and all the ones that make sense to me make no sense to anyone else. Some how I convinced myself that things would change that though time had passed it would work out and I would feel whole again but for some reason this whole semester has felt dark and gloomy filled with anger and angst never smile and it may be the weather and it may be the semester of lack of fulfillment but at the end of the day it was a bad year. I turned over a new leaf yesterday his true colors were revealed and though that doesn’t change how low I feel about myself currently it made me realize that no one deserves that kind of treatment even I don’t deserve that.

            What I mean to say is ones personality, ones spirit, ones soul it fades it shirks and grows depending on what is going on, what makes an effect on your life it is this horrible circle. I hate it there is no way to get out of the rut. When you feel like crap and your life is crap then there is just no way to get out of it, except to ride it out.

            SO you ride it out, till you own your personality till you get back that you are and regain the life you once had. Till you remember why you wake up each morning and why you want to continue on each day. It’s a struggle we all face and I won this time.