Emily Dickinson

You'll find the Emily Dickinson poems that we'll be discussing in class here. Stay tuned for which poems we'll be discussing on which day (9/25 and 9/30).

If you really dig Emily Dickinson, you can browse through her collected poems online.

Mr. Emerson, meet Mr. Whitman

R.W. Emerson's 1855 letter to Walt Whitman (appended to the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass):

DEAR SIR--I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of "LEAVES OF GRASS." I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed. I am very happy in reading it, as great power makes us happy. It meets the demand I am always making of what seemed the sterile and stingy nature, as if too much handiwork, or too much lymph in the temperament, were making our western wits fat and mean.

I give you joy of your free and brave thought. I have great joy in it. I find incomparable things said incomparably well, as they must be. I find the courage of treatment which so delights us, and which large perception only can inspire.
I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start. I rubbed my eyes a little, to see if this sunbeam were no illusion; but the solid sense of the book is a sober certainty. It has the best merits, namely, of fortifying and encouraging.

I did not know until I last night saw the book advertised in newspaper that I could trust the name as real and available for a post-office. I wish to see my benefactor, and have felt much like striking my tasks, and visiting New York to pay you my respects.

R.W. EMERSON

A photostat of the original letter can be found in the Library of Congress - - you can see it by clicking here.

Whitman's 1856 response to Emerson can be found here.

Whitman

From Leaves of Grass (1855):

I mind how we lay in June, such a transparent summer morning;

You settled your head athwart my hips and gently turned over upon me,

And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to my barestript heart,

And reached till you felt my beard, and reached till you held my feet.

Whitman, circa 1855



Whitman, in later life (circa 1873-1891):

Emerson assignment

Using the context of our discussion of Emerson's "The American Scholar" explain what he means when he says the following in his essay, "Self-Reliance": "Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members."