Friday, September 15, 2017

Art & Literature of the 19th Century

Painting/Poetry Groups

Pioneers! O Pioneers!" by Walt Whitman

“The Two Streams” by Oliver Wendell Holmes

“The Snowstorm” by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Niagra Falls by Frederic Church

“Old Ironsides” by Oliver Wendell Holmes

“Flaxman” by Margaret Fuller

“Meditations” by Margaret Fuller
The Three Tetons by Thomas Moran

“A Song” by Walt Whitman
The Oxbow by Thomas Cole

Our Banner in the Sky by Frederic Church

“The Birch-Tree” by James Russell Lowell
Cattleya Orchid by Martin Johnson Heade

“Stanzas on Freedom” by James Russell Lowell
Farmers Nooning by William Sydney Mount

Wednesday, September 6, 2017

Romanticism: Poetry


  • Emily Dickinson
    • From PoetryFoundation.org: Emily Dickinson is one of America’s greatest and most original poets of all time. She took definition as her province and challenged the existing definitions of poetry and the poet’s work. Like writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson,Henry David Thoreau, andWalt Whitman, she experimented with expression in order to free it from conventional restraints. Like writers such as Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, she crafted a new type of persona for the first person. The speakers in Dickinson’s poetry, like those in Brontë’s and Browning’s works, are sharp-sighted observers who see the inescapable limitations of their societies as well as their imagined and imaginable escapes. To make the abstract tangible, to define meaning without confining it, to inhabit a house that never became a prison, Dickinson created in her writing a distinctively elliptical language for expressing what was possible but not yet realized. Like the Concord Transcendentalists whose works she knew well, she saw poetry as a double-edged sword. While it liberated the individual, it as readily left him ungrounded. The literary marketplace, however, offered new ground for her work in the last decade of the 19th century. When the first volume of her poetry was published in 1890, four years after her death, it met with stunning success. Going through eleven editions in less than two years, the poems eventually extended far beyond their first household audiences.

Friday, September 1, 2017

American Hero and Transcendentalism



Agenda: