{"id":85,"date":"2019-12-12T00:22:33","date_gmt":"2019-12-12T00:22:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/courses.lumenlearning.com\/suny-jefferson-english102\/chapter\/the-romantic-period-1820-1860-essayists-and-poets-american-literature-i\/"},"modified":"2019-12-13T16:37:36","modified_gmt":"2019-12-13T16:37:36","slug":"the-romantic-period-1820-1860-essayists-and-poets-american-literature-i","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/courses.lumenlearning.com\/suny-jefferson-english102\/chapter\/the-romantic-period-1820-1860-essayists-and-poets-american-literature-i\/","title":{"raw":"The Romantic Period, 1820\u20131860: Essayists and Poets -- American Literature I","rendered":"The Romantic Period, 1820\u20131860: Essayists and Poets — American Literature I"},"content":{"raw":"
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Fresh New Vision Electrified Artistic and Intellectual Circles<\/h2>\r\n

The Romantic movement, which originated in Germany but quickly spread to England, France, and beyond, reached America around the year 1820, some twenty\u00a0years after William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge had revolutionized English poetry by publishing\u00a0Lyrical Ballads<\/em>. In America as in Europe, fresh new vision electrified artistic and intellectual circles. Yet there was an important difference: Romanticism in America coincided with the period of national expansion and the discovery of a distinctive American voice. The solidification of a national identity and the surging idealism and passion of Romanticism nurtured the masterpieces of \u201cthe American Renaissance.\u201d<\/p>\r\n

Romantic ideas centered around art as inspiration, the spiritual and aesthetic dimension of nature, and metaphors of organic growth. Art, rather than\u00a0science, Romantics argued, could best express universal truth. The Romantics underscored the importance of expressive art for the individual and society. In his essay \u201cThe Poet\u201d (1844), Ralph Waldo Emerson, perhaps the most influential writer of the Romantic era, asserts:<\/p>\r\n\r\n

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For all men live by truth, and stand in need of expression. In love, in art, in avarice, in politics, in labor, in games, we study to utter our painful secret. The man is only half himself, the other half is his expression.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

The development of the self became a major theme; self-awareness a primary method. If, according to Romantic theory, self and nature were one, self-awareness was not a selfish dead end but a mode of knowledge opening up the universe. If one\u2019s self were one with all humanity, then the individual had a moral duty to reform social inequalities and relieve human suffering. The idea of \u201cself\u201d\u2014which suggested selfishness to earlier generations\u2014was redefined. New compound words with positive meanings emerged: \u201cself-realization,\u201d \u201cself-expression,\u201d \u201cself-reliance.\u201d<\/p>\r\n

As the unique, subjective self became important, so did the realm of psychology. Exceptional artistic effects and techniques were developed to evoke heightened psychological states. The \u201csublime\u201d\u2014an effect of beauty in grandeur (for example, a view from a mountaintop)\u2014produced feelings of awe, reverence, vastness, and a power beyond human comprehension.<\/p>\r\n

Romanticism was affirmative and appropriate for most American poets and creative essayists. America\u2019s vast mountains, deserts, and tropics embodied the sublime. The Romantic spirit seemed particularly suited to American democracy: It stressed individualism, affirmed the value of the common person, and looked to the inspired imagination for its aesthetic and ethical values. Certainly the New England Transcendentalists\u2014Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and their associates\u2014were inspired to a new optimistic affirmation by the Romantic movement. In New England, Romanticism fell upon fertile soil.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

Transcendentalism<\/h3>\r\n

The Transcendentalist movement was a reaction against 18th century rationalism and a manifestation of the general humanitarian trend of nineteenth century thought. The movement was based on a fundamental belief in the unity of the world and God. The soul of each individual was thought to be identical with the world\u2014a microcosm of the world itself. The doctrine of self-reliance and individualism developed through the belief in the identification of the individual soul with God.<\/p>\r\n

Transcendentalism was intimately connected with Concord, a small New England village thirty-two\u00a0kilometers west of Boston. Concord was the first inland settlement of the original Massachusetts Bay Colony. Surrounded by forest, it was and remains a peaceful town close enough to Boston\u2019s lectures, bookstores, and colleges to be intensely cultivated, but far enough away to be serene. Concord was the site of the first battle of the American Revolution, and Ralph Waldo Emerson\u2019s poem commemorating the battle, \u201cConcord Hymn,\u201d has one of the most famous opening stanzas in American literature:<\/p>\r\n\r\n

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By the rude bridge that arched the flood\r\nTheir flag to April\u2019s breeze unfurled,\r\nHere once the embattled farmers stood\r\nAnd fired the shot heard round the world.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

Concord was the first rural artist\u2019s colony, and the first place to offer a spiritual and cultural alternative to American materialism. It was a place of high-minded conversation and simple living (Emerson and Henry David Thoreau both had vegetable gardens). Emerson, who moved to Concord in 1834, and Thoreau are most closely associated with the town, but the locale also attracted the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, the feminist writer Margaret Fuller, the educator (and father of novelist Louisa May Alcott) Bronson Alcott, and the poet William Ellery Channing. The Transcendental Club was loosely organized in 1836 and included, at various times, Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, Channing, Bronson Alcott, Orestes Brownson (a leading minister), Theodore Parker (abolitionist and minister), and others.<\/p>\r\n

The Transcendentalists published a quarterly magazine,\u00a0The Dial<\/em>, which lasted four years and was first edited by Margaret Fuller and later by Emerson. Reform efforts engaged them as well as literature. A number of Transcendentalists were abolitionists, and some were involved in experimental utopian communities such as nearby Brook Farm (described in Hawthorne\u2019s The Blithedale Romance<\/em>) and Fruitlands.<\/p>\r\n

Unlike many European groups, the Transcendentalists never issued a manifesto. They insisted on individual differences \u2013 on the unique viewpoint of the individual. American Transcendental Romantics pushed radical individualism to the extreme. American writers often saw themselves as lonely explorers outside society and convention. The American hero\u2014like Herman Melville\u2019s Captain Ahab, or Mark Twain\u2019s Huck Finn, or Edgar Allan Poe\u2019s Arthur Gordon Pym\u2014typically faced risk, or even certain destruction, in the pursuit of metaphysical self-discovery. For the Romantic American writer, nothing was a given. Literary and social conventions, far from being helpful, were dangerous. There was tremendous pressure to discover an authentic literary form, content, and voice \u2013 all at the same time. It is clear from the many masterpieces produced in the three decades before the U.S. Civil War (1861\u201365) that American writers rose to the challenge.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803\u20131882)<\/h4>\r\n

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the towering figure of his era, had a religious sense of mission. Although many accused him of subverting Christianity, he explained that, for him \u201cto be a good minister, it was necessary to leave the church.\u201d The address he delivered in 1838 at his alma mater, the Harvard Divinity School, made him unwelcome at Harvard for thirty years. In it, Emerson accused the church of acting \u201cas if God were dead\u201d and of emphasizing dogma while stifling the spirit.<\/p>\r\n

Emerson\u2019s philosophy has been called contradictory, and it is true that he consciously avoided building a logical intellectual system because such a rational system would have negated his Romantic belief in intuition and flexibility. In his essay \u201cSelf-Reliance,\u201d Emerson remarks: \u201cA foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.\u201d Yet he is remarkably consistent in his call for the birth of American individualism inspired by nature. Most of his major ideas\u2014the need for a new national vision, the use of personal experience, the notion of the cosmic Over-Soul, and the doctrine of compensation\u2014are suggested in his first publication,\r\nNature <\/em>(1836). This essay opens:<\/p>\r\n\r\n

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Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs. Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past\u2026? The sun shines today also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

Emerson loved the aphoristic genius of the sixteenth-century French essayist Montaigne, and he once told Bronson Alcott that he wanted to write a book\u00a0like Montaigne\u2019s, \u201cfull of fun, poetry, business, divinity, philosophy, anecdotes, smut.\u201d He complained that Alcott\u2019s abstract style omitted \u201cthe light that shines on a man\u2019s hat, in a child\u2019s spoon.\u201d<\/p>\r\n

Spiritual vision and practical, aphoristic expression make Emerson exhilarating; one of the Concord Transcendentalists aptly compared listening to him with \u201cgoing to heaven in a swing.\u201d Much of his spiritual insight comes from his readings in Eastern religion, especially Hinduism, Confucianism, and Islamic Sufism. For example, his poem \u201cBrahma\u201d relies on Hindu sources to assert a cosmic order beyond the limited perception of mortals:<\/p>\r\n\r\n

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If the red slayer think he slay Or the slain think he is slain, They know not well the subtle ways I keep, and pass, and turn again.\r\nFar or forgot to me is near Shadow and sunlight are the same; The vanished gods to me appear; And one to me are shame and fame.\r\nThey reckon ill who leave me out; When me they fly, I am the wings; I am the doubter and the doubt, And I the hymn the Brahmin sings\r\nThe strong gods pine for my abode, And pine in vain the sacred Seven, But thou, meek lover of the good! Find me, and turn thy back on heaven.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

This poem, published in the first number of the\u00a0Atlantic Monthly <\/em>magazine (1857), confused readers unfamiliar with Brahma, the highest Hindu god, the eternal and infinite soul of the universe. Emerson had this advice for his readers: \u201cTell them to say Jehovah instead of Brahma.\u201d<\/p>\r\n

The British critic Matthew Arnold said the most important writings in English in the nineteenth\u00a0century had been Wordsworth\u2019s poems and Emerson\u2019s essays. A great prose-poet, Emerson influenced a long line of American poets, including Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, and Robert Frost. He is also credited with influencing the philosophies of John Dewey, George Santayana, Friedrich Nietzsche, and William James.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

Henry David Thoreau (1817\u20131862)<\/h4>\r\n

Henry David Thoreau, of French and Scottish descent, was born in Concord and made it his permanent home. From a poor family, like Emerson, he worked his way through Harvard. Throughout his life, he reduced his needs to the simplest level and managed to live on very little money, thus\u00a0maintaining his independence. In essence, he made living his career. A nonconformist, he attempted to live his life at all times according to his rigorous principles. This attempt was the subject of many of his writings.<\/p>\r\n

Thoreau\u2019s masterpiece,\u00a0Walden<\/em>, or Life in the Woods<\/em> (1854), is the result of two years, two months, and two days (from 1845 to 1847) he spent living in a cabin he built at Walden Pond on property owned by Emerson. In Walden<\/em>, Thoreau consciously shapes this time into one year, and the book is carefully constructed so the seasons are subtly evoked in order. The book also is organized so that the simplest earthly concerns come first (in the section called \u201cEconomy,\u201d he describes the expenses of building a cabin); by the ending, the book has progressed to meditations on the stars.<\/p>\r\n

In\u00a0Walden<\/em>, Thoreau, a lover of travel books and the author of several, gives us an anti-travel book that paradoxically opens the inner frontier of self-discovery as no American book had up to this time. As deceptively modest as Thoreau\u2019s ascetic life, it is no less than a guide to living the classical ideal of the good life. Both poetry and philosophy, this long poetic essay challenges the reader to examine his or her life and live it authentically. The building of the cabin, described in great detail, is a concrete metaphor for the careful building of a soul. In his journal for January 30, 1852, Thoreau explains his preference for living rooted in one place: \u201cI am afraid to travel much or to famous places, lest it might completely dissipate the mind.\u201d<\/p>\r\n

Thoreau\u2019s method of retreat and concentration resembles Asian meditation techniques. The resemblance is not accidental: like Emerson and Whitman, he was influenced by Hindu and Buddhist philosophy. His most treasured possession was his library of Asian classics, which he shared with Emerson. His eclectic style draws on Greek and Latin classics and is crystalline, punning, and as richly metaphorical as the English metaphysical writers of the late Renaissance.<\/p>\r\n

In Walden<\/em>, Thoreau not only tests the theories of Transcendentalism, he reenacts the collective American experience of the nineteenth\u00a0century: living on the frontier. Thoreau felt that his contribution would be to renew a sense of the wilderness in language. His journal has an undated entry from 1851:<\/p>\r\n\r\n

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English literature from the days of the minstrels to the Lake Poets, Chaucer and Spenser and Shakespeare and Milton included, breathes no quite fresh and in this sense, wild strain. It is an essentially tame and civilized literature, reflecting Greece and Rome. Her wilderness is a greenwood, her wildman a Robin Hood. There is plenty of genial love of nature in her poets, but not so much of nature herself. Her chronicles inform us when her wild animals, but not the wildman in her, became extinct. There was need of America.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

Walden <\/em>inspired William Butler Yeats, a passionate Irish nationalist, to write \u201cThe Lake Isle of Innisfree,\u201d while Thoreau\u2019s essay \u201cCivil Disobedience,\u201d with its theory of passive resistance based on the moral necessity for the just individual to disobey unjust laws, was an inspiration for Mahatma Gandhi\u2019s Indian independence movement and Martin Luther King\u2019s struggle for black Americans\u2019 civil rights in the twentieth century.<\/p>\r\n

Thoreau is the most attractive of the Transcendentalists today because of his ecological consciousness, do-it-yourself independence, ethical commitment to abolitionism, and political theory of civil disobedience and peaceful resistance. His ideas are still fresh, and his incisive poetic style and habit of close observation are still modern.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

Walt Whitman (1819\u20131892)<\/h4>\r\n

Born on Long Island, New York, Walt Whitman was a part-time carpenter and man of the people, whose brilliant, innovative work expressed the country\u2019s democratic spirit. Whitman was largely self-taught; he left school at the age of 11 to go to work, missing the sort of traditional education that made most American authors respectful imitators of the English.\u00a0His\u00a0Leaves of Grass <\/em>(1855), which he rewrote and revised throughout his life, contains \u201cSong of Myself,\u201d the most stunningly original poem ever written by an American. The enthusiastic praise that Emerson and a few others heaped on this daring volume confirmed Whitman in his poetic vocation, although the book was not a popular success.<\/p>\r\n

A visionary book celebrating all creation,\u00a0Leaves of Grass <\/em>was inspired largely by Emerson\u2019s writings, especially his essay \u201cThe Poet,\u201d which predicted a robust, open-hearted, universal kind of poet uncannily like Whitman himself. The poem\u2019s innovative, unrhymed, free-verse form, open celebration of sexuality, vibrant democratic sensibility, and extreme Romantic assertion that the poet\u2019s self was one with the poem, the universe, and the reader permanently altered the course of American poetry.<\/p>\r\n

Leaves of Grass <\/em>is as vast, energetic, and natural as the American continent; it was the epic generations of American critics had been calling for, although they did not recognize it. Movement ripples through \u201cSong of Myself\u201d like restless music:<\/p>\r\n\r\n

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My ties and ballasts leave me . . . I skirt sierras, my palms cover continents I am afoot with my vision.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

The poem bulges with myriad concrete sights and sounds. Whitman\u2019s birds are not the conventional \u201cwinged spirits\u201d of poetry. His \u201cyellow-crown\u2019d heron comes to the edge of the marsh at night and feeds upon small crabs.\u201d Whitman seems to project himself into everything that he sees or imagines. He is mass man, \u201cVoyaging to every port to dicker and adventure, \/ Hurrying with the modern crowd as eager and fickle as any.\u201d But he is equally the suffering individual, \u201cThe mother of old, condemn\u2019d for a witch, burnt with dry wood, her children gazing on\u2026.I am the hounded slave, I wince at the bite of the dogs\u2026.I am the mash\u2019d fireman with breast-bone broken\u2026.\u201d<\/p>\r\n

More than any other writer, Whitman invented the myth of democratic America. \u201cThe Americans of all nations at any time upon the earth have probably the fullest poetical nature. The United States is essentially the greatest poem.\u201d When Whitman wrote this, he daringly turned upside down the general opinion that America was too brash and new to be poetic. He invented a timeless America of the free imagination, peopled with pioneering spirits of all nations. D.H. Lawrence, the British novelist and poet, accurately called him the poet of the \u201copen road.\u201d<\/p>\r\n

Whitman\u2019s greatness is visible in many of his poems, among them \u201cCrossing Brooklyn Ferry,\u201d \u201cOut of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,\u201d and \u201cWhen Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom\u2019d,\u201d a moving elegy on the death of Abraham Lincoln. Another important work is his long essay \u201cDemocratic Vistas\u201d (1871), written during the unrestrained materialism of industrialism\u2019s \u201cGilded Age.\u201d In this essay, Whitman justly criticizes America for its \u201cmighty, many-threaded wealth and industry\u201d that mask an underlying \u201cdry and flat Sahara\u201d of soul. He calls for a new kind of literature to revive the American population (\u201cNot the book needs so much to be the complete thing, but the reader of the book does\u201d). Yet ultimately, Whitman\u2019s main claim to immortality lies in \u201cSong of Myself.\u201d Here he places the Romantic self at the center of the consciousness of the poem:<\/p>\r\n\r\n

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I celebrate myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

Whitman\u2019s voice electrifies even modern readers with his proclamation of the unity and vital force of all creation. He was enormously innovative. From him spring the poem as autobiography, the American Everyman as bard, the reader as creator, and the still-contemporary discovery of \u201cexperimental,\u201d or organic, form.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

The Brahmin Poets<\/h3>\r\n

In their time, the Boston Brahmins (as the patrician, Harvard-educated class came to be called) supplied the most respected and genuinely cultivated literary arbiters of the United States. Their lives fitted a pleasant pattern of wealth and leisure directed by the strong New England work ethic and respect for learning.<\/p>\r\n

In an earlier Puritan age, the Boston Brahmins would have been ministers; in the nineteenth\u00a0century, they became professors, often at Harvard. Late in life they sometimes became ambassadors or received honorary degrees from European institutions. Most of them travelled or were educated in Europe: They were familiar with the ideas and books of Britain, Germany, and France, and often Italy and Spain. Upper class in background but democratic in sympathy, the Brahmin poets carried their genteel, European-oriented views to every section of the United States, through public lectures at the three thousand\u00a0lyceums (centers for public lectures) and in the pages of two influential Boston magazines, the\u00a0North American Review <\/em>and the Atlantic Monthly<\/em>.<\/p>\r\n

The writings of the Brahmin poets fused American and European traditions and sought to create a continuity of shared Atlantic experience. These scholar-poets attempted to educate and elevate the general populace by introducing a European dimension to American literature. Ironically, their overall effect was conservative. By insisting on European things and forms, they retarded the growth of a distinctive American consciousness. Well-meaning men, their conservative backgrounds blinded them to the daring innovativeness of Thoreau, Whitman (whom they refused to meet socially), and Edgar Allan Poe (whom even Emerson regarded as the \u201cjingle man\u201d). They were pillars of what was called the \u201cgenteel tradition\u201d that three generations of American realists had to battle. Partly because of their benign but bland influence, it was almost one hundred\u00a0years before the distinctive American genius of Whitman, Melville, Thoreau, and Poe was generally recognized in the United States.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

Margaret Fuller (1810\u20131850)<\/h4>\r\n

Margaret Fuller, an outstanding essayist, was born and raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts. From a modest financial background, she was educated at home by her father (women were not allowed to attend Harvard) and became a child prodigy in the classics and modern literatures. Her special passion was German Romantic literature, especially Goethe, whom she translated.<\/p>\r\n

The first professional woman journalist of note in America, Fuller wrote influential book reviews and reports on social issues such as the treatment of women prisoners and the insane. Some of these essays were published in her book\u00a0Papers on Literature and Art <\/em>(1846). A year earlier, she had her most significant book, Woman in the Nineteenth Century<\/em>. It originally had appeared in the Transcendentalist magazine, The Dial<\/em>, which she edited from 1840 to 1842.<\/p>\r\n

Fuller\u2019s\u00a0Woman in the Nineteenth Century <\/em>is the earliest and most American exploration of women\u2019s role in society. Often applying democratic and Transcendental principles, Fuller thoughtfully analyzes the numerous subtle causes and evil consequences of sexual discrimination and suggests positive steps to be taken. Many of her ideas are strikingly modern. She stresses the importance of \u201cself-dependence,\u201d which women lack because \u201cthey are taught to learn their rule from without, not to unfold it from within.\u201d<\/p>\r\n

Fuller is finally not a feminist so much as an activist and reformer dedicated to the cause of creative human freedom and dignity for all:<\/p>\r\n\r\n

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. . . Let us be wise and not impede the soul. . . . Let us have one creative energy. . . .Let it take what form it will, and let us not bind it by the past to man or woman, black or white.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

Emily Dickinson (1830\u20131886)<\/h4>\r\n

Emily Dickinson is, in a sense, a link between her era and the literary sensitivities of the turn of the century. A radical individualist, she was born and spent her life in Amherst, Massachusetts, a small Calvinist village. She never married, and she led an unconventional life that was outwardly uneventful but was full of inner intensity. She loved nature and found deep inspiration in the birds, animals, plants, and changing seasons of the New England countryside.<\/p>\r\n

Dickinson spent the latter part of her life as a recluse, due to an extremely sensitive psyche and possibly to make time for writing (for stretches of time she wrote about one poem a day). Her day also included homemaking for her attorney father, a prominent figure in Amherst who became a member of Congress.<\/p>\r\n

Dickinson was not widely read, but knew the Bible, the works of William Shakespeare, and works of classical mythology in great depth. These were her true teachers, for Dickinson was certainly the most solitary literary figure of her time. That this shy, withdrawn, village woman, almost unpublished and unknown, created some of the greatest American poetry of the nineteenth\u00a0century has fascinated the public since the 1950s, when her poetry was rediscovered.<\/p>\r\n

Dickinson\u2019s terse, frequently imagistic style is even more modern and innovative than Whitman\u2019s. She never uses two words when one will do, and combines concrete things with abstract ideas in an almost proverbial, compressed style. Her best poems have no fat; many mock current sentimentality, and some are even heretical. She sometimes shows a terrifying existential awareness. Like Poe, she explores the dark and hidden part of the mind, dramatizing death and the grave. Yet she also celebrated simple objects \u2013 a flower, a bee. Her poetry exhibits great intelligence and often evokes the agonizing paradox of the limits of the human consciousness trapped in time. She had an excellent sense of humor, and her range of subjects and treatment is amazingly wide. Her poems are generally known by the numbers assigned them in Thomas H. Johnson\u2019s standard edition of 1955. They bristle with odd capitalizations and dashes.<\/p>\r\n

A nonconformist, like Thoreau she often reversed meanings of words and phrases and used paradox to great effect. From 435:<\/p>\r\n\r\n

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Much Madness is divinest sense \u2013 To a discerning Eye \u2013 Much Sense \u2013 the starkest Madness \u2013 \u2018Tis the Majority In this, as All, prevail \u2013 Assent \u2013 and you are sane \u2013 Demur \u2013 you\u2019re straightway dangerous And handled with a chain \u2013<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

Her wit shines in the following poem (288), which ridicules ambition and public life:<\/p>\r\n\r\n

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I\u2019m Nobody! Who are you? Are you \u2013 Nobody \u2013 Too? Then there\u2019s a pair of us? Don\u2019t tell! they\u2019d advertise \u2013 you know!\r\nHow dreary \u2013 to be \u2013 Somebody! How public \u2013 like a Frog \u2013 To tell one\u2019s name \u2013 the livelong June \u2013 To an admiring Bog!<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

Dickinson\u2019s 1,775 poems continue to intrigue critics, who often disagree about them. Some stress her mystical side, some her sensitivity to nature; many note her odd, exotic appeal. One modern critic, R. P. Blackmur, comments that Dickinson\u2019s poetry sometimes feels as if \u201ca cat came at us speaking English.\u201d Her clean, clear, chiseled poems are some of the most fascinating and challenging in American literature.<\/p>\r\n

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Public domain content<\/div>\r\n