Late 19th century and Poetry

The second half of the 19th century, was dominated in America by the recovery from the aftermath of the Civil War. At the same time, a much needed and new economic era began to surface and to grow up at a fast rate. It led to the introduction of the railroad industry and other manufacturing jobs that never existed before. The face of the American society and culture began to change drastically.

The emerging of this machine-driven industrialization began gradually to transform the face of the American society. It thus triggered the development of a new urban life and new revolutionary and social concepts that in turn led to changes in sciences and arts including in literature and poetry. In my view, two of the poets that best contributed to catapult the American poetry of the 19th century towards news horizons of Romanticism were the famous Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman. Their merits were that they have bravely departed from obeying the traditional rules of the ancient style of Poetry and adventured their work arts and thus the American Romanticism into this new oasis of cultural freedom and beauty. Whitman’s poetry does not abide by the rules neither of the traditional rhyme nor of the blank verse. Whitman poems seem to lack an internal structure when analyzed from a classical standpoint. They seem to lack a rhyme structure and they seem to be a descriptive poetry with a sort of run-on inside their lines or their stanzas.
For example, the excerpt below is extracted from “from song of myself”. It dangerously resembles a priori a simple compilation of lines. However, an extensive review of Walt Whitman reveals that he defines the artistic value of his masterpieces around a simple exposition of his ideas all elegantly staggered by category. The excerpt reads:


“Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,
And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,
Growing among black folks as among white,
Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, “I give them the same, I
receive them the same.”

Emily Dickinson has brought the American romanticism into a different school of poetry when compared to the works of Whitman and the others. Emily built her work around a structure that she likes: the ballad meter or ballad stanza, in trends of four lines each with a beautifully identified internal cadence of rhyme. Emily pushes the breakage away from the tradition even in her plain choice of themes for her poetry. Most of them oddly gravitate and expand on the concepts of suffering, death, life after death and immortality. For example in poem # 479 that we reviewed last week, Emily uses the ballad meter format (8 6 8 6) to juggle with death and immortality:

“Because I could not stop for Death
He kindly stopped for me
The Carriage held but just Ourselves
And Immortality…”