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.”