AMERICAN LITERATURE - WALT WHITMAN : POETRY OF WALT WHITMAN

AMERICAN LITERATURE - WALT WHITMAN : POETRY OF WALT WHITMAN AMERICAN LITERATURE - WALT WHITMAN : POETRY OF WALT WHITMAN

The Poetry of Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman heard America singing. Not in concert halls or statehouses, but in the carpenter's measuring saw, the mason's trowel, the boatman's cry on the river. He placed his ear against the continent and listened to the varied carols—the mother's lullaby, the deckhand's curse, the scholar's whispered footnote. All of it belonged. None of it was too small, too rough, or too strange for verse.

He began as a printer's apprentice on Long Island, setting type for newspapers, then became a teacher, a nurse, a journalist, a walker of Brooklyn streets. In 1855, he published *Leaves of Grass* at his own expense. The book had no author's name on its title page, only a portrait of a bearded man in a work shirt, one hand on his hip, the other in his pocket, staring directly at the reader. The poems inside broke every rule. No regular meter. No stanzas locked in rhyme. Long, breathing lines that rolled like the tides. He called them "barbaric yawps."

He celebrated the body with the same fervor that others reserved for the soul. "If I worship one thing more than another," he wrote, "it shall be the spread of my own body." He sang of armpits, of hair, of the muscle's pleasure. Critics called it obscene. Emerson called it extraordinary. He wrote for the common man but addressed the cosmos. "I contain multitudes," he said. The small self and the vast self. The blade of grass and the star.

During the Civil War, he worked as a wound-dresser in Washington hospitals, washing gangrene from soldiers' legs, writing letters for dying boys who could not hold a pen. That tenderness never left his poetry. He did not ask for perfection. He asked for presence. "Not till the sun excludes you do I exclude you," he wrote. To read Whitman is to be invited—urgently, generously, wholly—to exist.

AMERICAN LITERATURE - EMILY DICKINSON: POETRY OF EMILY DICKINSON

AMERICAN LITERATURE - EMILY DICKINSON: POETRY OF EMILY DICKINSON AMERICAN LITERATURE - EMILY DICKINSON: POETRY OF EMILY DICKINSON

The Poetry of Emily Dickinson**

She lived in Amherst, in a corner of a garden, behind a door that turned on no hinge of vanity. The world called it seclusion; she called it circumference. Emily Dickinson wrote nearly eighteen hundred poems, yet during her lifetime, only a handful slipped out—like bees escaped from a hidden hive—anonymous, untitled, unheard.

Her poem begins not with a subject but with a disturbance. A fly. A chill. A certain slant of light on winter afternoons. That light, she says, oppresses like the Heft of Cathedral Tunes. What hymn does the shadow sing? What sermon does the silence preach? She will not explain. She will only tell you that the Hours are thin as Threads, and that Pain cannot be kept in Number—it has no numeral large enough.

She writes without titles, using dashes like trapdoors. The line breaks open. The rhyme arrives slant, almost missing, like a kiss that lands on the corner of a mouth. Tell all the truth but tell it slant — success in Circuit lies. To her, the truth is too bright for the brain's weak room. We require the oblique, the metaphor, the riddle. She gives us a loaded gun that speaks, a funeral in the brain, a dying tiger with his eye on the sun.

What did she fear? Eternity without a door. What did she love? The syllable of a word unspoken. She called hope the thing with feathers that perches in the soul. And death? She visited it often, like a neighbor. Because I could not stop for Death — He kindly stopped for me. The carriage held but just Ourselves — and Immortality.

She died in 1886, her poems folded into a cherrywood desk. Her sister found them—fascicles, stitched by hand—and gave them to the world. Now the woman in white speaks from every library. Her voice is a bee's hum, a loaded gun, a frog's declamation in a bog. She is never where you look, but always where you listen.

AMERICAN LITERATURE - MARK TWAIN: THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN

AMERICAN LITERATURE - MARK TWAIN: THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN AMERICAN LITERATURE - MARK TWAIN: THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn**

You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of *The Adventures of Tom Sawyer*, but that ain't no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mostly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth. I ain't a-going to stretch nothing for you. I reckon I ought to tell you right now that I never had much of a chance to be good. The Widow Douglas she took me for her son, and allowed she would sivilize me. But it was rough living in a house with all them rules. You had to wash before you set down to dinner, and comb your hair, and go to church regular. I couldn't stand it.

Then Pap he come around—that drunken old cuss. He beat me now and then, but I got used to that. When he locked me up in the cabin, I didn't mind much because I found a old saw and cut my way out. I made it look like I was murdered—chopped up a wild pig and spread blood around. That was a good one. Tom Sawyer couldn't have done it better.

After I lit out, I met Jim, Miss Watson's big nigger. He run off because she was going to sell him down to New Orleans. We rafted together on the Mississippi at night, and hid during the day. Jim talked about getting to Cairo, where the Ohio River meets up, then going free up north. I didn't care much about freedom then. I just wanted to be away from the Widow and away from Pap. That river was the best place I ever been. The stars hung low over the water, and the current pulled us slow and steady into the dark. You didn't owe nobody nothing out there. It was just you and the raft and Jim, floating. That's all I ever wanted.

AMERICAN LITERATURE - RALPH WALDO EMERSON: THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

AMERICAN LITERATURE - RALPH WALDO EMERSON: THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR AMERICAN LITERATURE - RALPH WALDO EMERSON: THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

The American Scholar**

I greet you on the re-commencement of our literary year. Our anniversary is not merely a celebration of books, but a call to action. There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide. He must take himself—his whole, raw, unaccommodated self—for better, for worse, as his only true possession.

The scholar is that delegated intellect. In the divided state of society, we have lost the whole man. The farmer is reduced to a laborer, the merchant to a speculator, the priest to a ritualist. But the scholar must resist this fragmentation. He is not a mere thinker, nor a passive bookworm, but *Man Thinking*. He does not borrow from the past; he creates the future. England’s Shakespeare and Germany’s Goethe are his guides, not his masters. The books of antiquity are but the record of a bygone mind. The scholar must write his own Bible today.

The first and great resource of the scholar is Nature. The second is the past—books. Yet books are for the scholar’s idle times. When they are held as absolute truth, they become tyrannical. The third and most vital influence is Action. Without action, thought can never ripen into truth. The scholar who labors with his hands, who engages with the world’s commerce, who speaks against injustice—he alone knows the weight of an idea. I look upon the scattered condition of our country and I see a new hope. Our long dependence on foreign learning must end. We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe. The sun shines today on our own fields, on our own rivers, on our own unpretending log cabins. We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds. The scholar is the world’s eye and the world’s heart. He is the first of men. The hour is now.

AMERICAN LITERATURE - EDGAR ALLAN POE: THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER

AMERICAN LITERATURE - EDGAR ALLAN POE: THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER AMERICAN LITERATURE - EDGAR ALLAN POE: THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER

The Fall of the House of Usher

During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country. At length I found myself within view of the melancholy House of Usher. Upon crossing the threshold, I felt a sense of insufferable gloom pervading my spirit—a chill, a sickness, a revulsion of the heart.

Roderick Usher, my boyhood companion, had summoned me in a letter filled with wild desperation. His sister, Madeline, he said, suffered from a mysterious malady—a cataleptic trance that had slowly drained her of life. Yet when I looked upon Roderick, I saw a man already haunted. His pale, ghostly skin and his eyes, liquid and terrible, spoke of a terror beyond mere illness. The house itself seemed sentient—its stones, its turrets, its cadaverous vaults, all alive with a sinister sentience.

We passed days in haunted silence, painting and reading by candelight. Then came the entombment. Believing Madeline dead, we placed her within a copper-lined vault deep beneath the mansion. But on the seventh night, a storm of invisible fury raged outside. Roderick, trembling, whispered, “Hear you not it? She is coming!” A moment later, the doors flew open. Madeline Usher stood there, blood upon her white robes. With a low, gasping cry, she fell upon her brother, and in his death, she died.

I fled in terror. As I rode away, the ancient walls split and crumbled. The tarn closed over the ruins with a dark and silent wave. The House of Usher was no more.