American Literature:

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American Literature

• Literary Eras and Authors
• Week Seven

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Lecture Outline

• Romanticism in America (Continued)
• William Cullen Bryant
• Edgar Allan Poe
• Reading Assignments

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William Cullen Bryant

• Born Nov. 3, 1794 , Cummington, Mass
• Died June 12, 1878 , New York City
• American poet and newspaper editor.
• First American writer of verse to win
  international acclaim.

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William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878)

• Bryant was considered a child-prodigy, publishing
  his first poem at age ten and his first book when
  he was thirteen.
• Bryant studied both Latin and Greek. The son of a
  learned and highly respected physician, he was
  exposed to English poetry and had access to a
  library full of the classics in his fathers vast
  library, which explains many of the classical
  allusions in his poetry.
• As a boy he became devoted to the New England
  countryside and was a keen observer of nature. In
  his early poems such as Thanatopsis, To a
  Waterfowl, Inscription for the Entrance to a
  Wood, and The Yellow Violet, all written
  before he was 21, he celebrated the majesty of
  nature in a style that was influenced by the
  English romantics but also reflected a personal
  simplicity and dignity.

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William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878)

• Dr Bryant, his father, interceded in many points
  of Bryant's life. He pushed Bryant towards the
  legal profession, helped critique and even sent
  his poems, without his son's approval, to
  literary magazines, and helped to publish his
  first book, Embargo .
• Admitted to the bar in 1815. He practiced law in
  Great Barrington, Mass., supporting a wife and
  family, and wrote very little between 1818-1825.
• He became associate editor of the New York
  Evening Post in 1826, after giving up the
  drudgery of practicing law. From 1829 to his
  death he was part owner and editor in chief. An
  industrious and forthright editor of a highly
  literate paper, he was a defender of human rights
  and an advocate of free trade (Laissez-Faire),
  abolition of slavery, and other reforms. His
  influence from the editorial desk of the New York
  Evening Post was great.

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William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878)

• He also holds an important place in literature as
  the earliest American theorist of poetry. In his
  Lectures on Poetry (delivered 1825 published
  1884) and other critical essays he stressed the
  values of simplicity, original imagination, and
  morality.
• During his later career Bryant traveled widely,
  made many public speeches, and continued to write
  a few poems (e.g., The Death of the Flowers,
  To the Fringed Gentian, and The
  Battle-Field). His blank verse translation of
  the Iliad appeared in 1870, that of the Odyssey
  in 1872.
• Bryant received great praise for his poetry, but
  the critics did not give him unconditional
  laurels, due to the absence of a full range of
  poetry, such as epics, elegies, and verse drama.
  He looked at art as something demanding time and
  reflection. Although he published little as he
  became immersed in the journalistic life, he was
  extremely popular in his time.

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To a Waterfowl

• Whither, 'midst falling dew,
• While glow the heavens with the last steps of
  day,
• Far, through their rosy depths, dost thou pursue
• Thy solitary way?
• Vainly the fowler's eye
• Might mark thy distant flight to do thee wrong,
• As, darkly painted on the crimson sky,
• Thy figure floats along.
• Seek'st thou the plashy brink
• Of weedy lake, or marge of river wide,
• Or where the rocking billows rise and sink
• On the chafed ocean side?
• There is a Power whose care
• Teaches thy way along that pathless coast,--
• The desert and illimitable air,--
• Lone wandering, but not lost.

• All day thy wings have fann'd
• At that far height, the cold thin atmosphere
• Yet stoop not, weary, to the welcome land,
• Though the dark night is near.
• And soon that toil shall end,
• Soon shalt thou find a summer home, and rest,
• And scream among thy fellows reeds shall bend
• Soon o'er thy sheltered nest.
• Thou'rt gone, the abyss of heaven
• Hath swallowed up thy form yet, on my heart
• Deeply hath sunk the lesson thou hast given,
• And shall not soon depart.
• He, who, from zone to zone,
• Guides through the boundless sky thy certain
  flight,
• In the long way that I must tread alone,
• Will lead my steps aright.

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Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)

• Main Literary Works
• Annabel Lee (1849)
• To Helen (1848)
• The Raven (1845)
• The Fall of the House of Usher (1839)

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Edgar Allan Poe

• One of the greatest and unhappiest of American
  poets, a master of the horror tale, and the
  patron saint of the detective story.
• First gained critical acclaim in France and
  England. His reputation in America was relatively
  slight until the French-influenced writers and
  the Lovecraft school created interest in his
  work.

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Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)

• Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston,
  Massachusetts, to parents who were itinerant
  actors. His father David Poe Jr. died probably in
  1810. Elizabeth Hopkins Poe died in 1811, leaving
  three children. Edgar was taken into the home of
  a Richmond merchant John Allan. The remaining
  children were cared for by others. Poe's brother
  William died young and sister Rosalie become
  later insane. At the age of five Poe could recite
  passages of English poetry. Later one of his
  teachers in Richmond said While the other boys
  wrote mere mechanical verses, Poe wrote genuine
  poetry the boy was a born poet.
• Poe was brought up partly in England (1815-20),
  where he attended Manor School at Stoke
  Newington. Later it become the setting for his
  story William Wilson. Never legally adopted,
  Poe took Allan's name for his middle name.

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Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)

• Poe attended the University of Virginia
  (1826-27), but was expelled for not paying his
  gambling debts. This led to quarrel with Allan,
  who refused to pay the debts. Allan later
  disowned him. During his stay at the university,
  Poe composed some tales, but little is known of
  his apprentice works.
• In 1827 Poe joined the U.S. Army as a common
  soldier under assumed name, Edgar A. Perry. In
  1830 Poe entered West Point. He was dishonorably
  discharged next year, for intentional neglect of
  his duties - apparently as a result of his own
  determination to be released.
• In 1833 Poe lived in Baltimore with his father's
  sister Mrs. Maria Clemm. After winning a prize of
  50 for a short story, he started career as a
  staff member of various magazines, among which
  Southern Literary Messenger he had to leave
  partly due to his alcoholism. During these years
  he wrote some of his best-known stories.

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Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)

• In 1836 Poe married his 13-year-old cousin
  Virginia Clemm. She bust a blood vessel in 1842,
  and remained a virtual invalid until her death
  from tuberculosis five years later.
• After the death of his wife, Poe began to lose
  his struggle with drinking and drugs. He had
  several romances, including an affair with the
  poet Sarah Helen Whitman, who said His proud
  reserve, his profound melancholy, his
  unworldliness - may we not say his unearthliness
  of nature - made his character one very difficult
  of comprehension to the casual observer.
• In 1849 Poe become again engaged to Elmira
  Royster, whom he was engaged to in 1826. To
  Virginia he addressed the famous poem Annabel
  Lee (1849) - its subject, Poe's favorite, is the
  death of a beautiful woman.

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Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)

• Poes first collection, Tales of the Grotesque
  and Arabesque, appeared in 1840. It contained one
  of his most famous work, The Fall of the House
  of Usher. In the story the narrator visits the
  crumbling mansion of his friend, Roderick Usher,
  and tries to dispel Roderick's gloom. Although
  his twin sister, Madeline, has been placed in the
  family vault dead, Roderick is convinced that she
  lives. Madeline arises in trance, and carries her
  brother to death. The house itself splits asunder
  and sinks into the tarn.
• The tale has inspired several film adaptations.
  Roger Cormans version from 1960 was the first of
  the director's Poe movies. The Raven (1963)
  collected old stars of the horror genre, Vincent
  Price, Peter, Lorre, and Boris Karloff. Corman
  filmed the picture in fifteen days, using
  revamped portions of his previous Poe sets.

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Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)

• The dark poem of lost love, The Raven, brought
  Poe national fame, when it appeared in 1845.
  With me poetry has been not a purpose, but a
  passion and the passions should be held in
  reverence they must not - they cannot at will be
  excited, with an eye to the paltry compensations,
  or the more paltry commendations, of mankind.
  (from The Raven and Other Poems, preface, 1845)
• In a lecture in Boston the author said that the
  two most effective letters in the English
  language were o and r - this inspired the
  expression nevermore in The Raven, and because
  a parrot is unworthy of the dignity of poetry, a
  raven could well repeat the word at the end of
  each stanza. Lenore rhymed with nevermore. The
  poem has inspired a number of artists.
• Poe suffered from bouts of depression and
  madness, and he attempted suicide in 1848. In
  September the following year he disappeared for
  three days after a drink at a birthday party and
  on his way to visit his new fiancée in Richmond.
  He turned up in delirious condition in Baltimore
  gutter and died on October 7, 1849.

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Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)

• Poe's work and his theory of pure poetry was
  early recognized especially in France, where he
  inspired many writers.
• In his supernatural fiction Poe usually dealt
  with paranoia rooted in personal psychology,
  physical or mental enfeeblement, obsessions, the
  damnation of death, feverish fantasies, the
  cosmos as source of horror and inspiration,
  without bothering himself with such supernatural
  beings as ghosts, werewolves, vampires, and so
  on. Some of his short stories are humorous, among
  them 'The Devil in the Belfry,' 'The Duc de
  l'Omelette,' 'Bon-Bon' and 'Never Bet the Devil
  Your Head,' all of which employ the Devil as an
  ironic figure of fun.
• Poe was also one of the most prolific literary
  journalists in American history, one whose
  extensive body of reviews and criticism has yet
  to be collected fully. James Russell Lowell
  (1819-91) once wrote about Poe Three fifths of
  him genius and two fifths sheer fudge.

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To Helen ???

• Helen , thy beauty is to me
• Like those Nicean barks of yore,
• That gently, oer a perfumed sea,
• The weary, wayworn wanderer bore
• To his own native shore.
• On desperate seas long wont to roam,
• Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face,
• Thy Naiad airs have brought me home
• To the glory that was Greece
• And the grandeur that was Rome.
• Lo! In yon brilliant window niche,
• How statue_like I see thee stand,
• The agate lamp within thy hand !
• Ah, Psyche, from the regions which
• Are Holy Land !

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The Fall of the House of Usher (1839)

• When Edgar Allan Poe wrote The Fall of the House
  of Usher, two factors greatly influenced his
  writing. A first influence was John Lockes idea
  of Empiricism, which was the idea that all
  knowledge was gained by experiences, exclusively
  through the senses. A second vital influence was
  Transcendentalism, which was a reaction to
  Empiricism. Poe mocks the transcendental beliefs,
  by allowing the characters Roderick Usher,
  Madeline Usher, the house and the atmosphere to
  travel in a downward motion into decay and death,
  rather than the upward transcendence into life
  and rebirth that the transcendentalists depict.
  The transcendence of the mind begins with
  Roderick Usher and is reflected in the characters
  and environment around him.

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The Fall of the House of Usher (1839)

• The beliefs of transcendentalists are
  continuously filled with bright colors and ideas,
  and heavenly-like tones. The character Roderick
  Usher suffered much from a morbid acuteness of
  the senses which refers to his transcendental
  beliefs. Usher finds his transcendental
  connection with the oversoul but instead of
  brightness he finds gloom with black, white and
  gray colors. Madeline Usher suffers from "a
  gradual wasting away of the person, and frequent
  although transient affections of a partially
  cataleptical character. This results from a loss
  of contact with the physical world, again a
  characteristic of a transcendentalist, yet
  negative instead of positive.

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The Fall of the House of Usher (1839)

• This work also represents a continuous opposition
  to the transcendentalist views. The mockery of
  the transcendentalist views are found through the
  characters, the environment, and the house
  instead of light and life, Poe displays a
  continuation of darkness and death. The complete
  decay of Usher is found in the house as the
  narrator witnesses my brain reeled as I saw the
  mighty walls rushing asunder. Poe views the
  transcendentalist thoughts as much too bright and
  unrealistic, and the ultimate transcendence
  downward displays his opposite opinions. The
  decaying mind of Usher, the gloomy environment,
  and the downward structure of the house all work
  together to destroy the traditional bright
  transcendentalist ideas, and to complete the
  final "Fall of the House of Usher".

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Reading Assignments

• 1. Biographical introduction to William Cullen
  Bryant
• (Textbook P.119-120)
• 2. Study texts of four poems by William Cullen
  Bryant
• 3. Biographical introduction to Edgar Allan Poe
• (Textbook P.126-128)
• 4. The Raven ??
• 5. Audio Poetry Three Poems by Edgar Allan Poe
• 6. Short story The Fall of the House of Usher
• (Textbook P.136-161)
• Websites
• 1. Knowing Poe
• 2. Poe Museum
• 3. Edgar Allan Poe at enotes.com