Classic American Poetry
Emily Dickinson · Robert Frost · Henry Wadsworth Longfellow · Ralph Waldo Emerson · Walt Whitman
Sep 2004 · Naxos AudioBooks · Narrated by Garrick Hagon, Liza Ross, William Hootkins, Kate Harper, James Goode, and Alibe Parsons
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2 hr 31 min
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The United States themselves are, essentially, the greatest poem’ said Walt Whitman. Here are the much-loved examples of the free spirit of America in all its glory.
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Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts on December 10, 1830. Although one of America's most acclaimed poets, the bulk of her work was not published until well after her death on May 15, 1886. The few poems published in her lifetime were not received with any great fanfare. After her death, Dickinson's sister Lavinia found over 1,700 poems Emily had written and stashed away in a drawer -- the accumulation of a life's obsession with words. Critics have agreed that Dickinson's poetry was well ahead of its time. Today she is considered one of the best poets of the English language. Except for a year spent at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in South Hadley, Dickinson spent her entire life in the family home in Amherst, Massachusetts. She never married and began to withdraw from society, eventually becoming a recluse. Dickinson's poetry engages the reader and requires his or her participation. Full of highly charged metaphors, her free verse and choice of words are best understood when read aloud. Dickinson's punctuation and capitalization, not orthodox by Victorian standards and called "spasmodic" by her critics, give greater emphasis to her meanings.
During his lifetime, Longfellow enjoyed a popularity that few poets have ever known. This has made a purely literary assessment of his achievement difficult, since his verse has had an effect on so many levels of American culture and society. Certainly, some of his most popular poems are, when considered merely as artistic compositions, found wanting in serious ways: the confused imagery and sentimentality of "A Psalm of Life" (1839), the excessive didacticism of "Excelsior" (1841), the sentimentality of "The Village Blacksmith" (1839). Yet, when judged in terms of popular culture, these works are probably no worse and, in some respects, much better than their counterparts in our time. Longfellow was very successful in responding to the need felt by Americans of his time for a literature of their own, a retelling in verse of the stories and legends of these United States, especially New England. His three most popular narrative poems are thoroughly rooted in American soil. "Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie" (1847), an American idyll; "The Song of Hiawatha" (1855), the first genuinely native epic in American poetry; and "The Courtship of Miles Standish" (1858), a Puritan romance of Longfellow's own ancestors, John Alden and Priscilla Mullens. "Paul Revere's Ride," the best known of the "Tales of a Wayside Inn"(1863), is also intensely national. Then, there is a handful of intensely personal, melancholy poems that deal in very successful ways with those themes not commonly thought of as Longfellow's: sorrow, death, frustration, the pathetic drift of humanity's existence. Chief among these are "My Lost Youth" (1855), "Mezzo Cammin" (1842), "The Ropewalk" (1854), "The Jewish Cemetery at Newport" (1852), and, most remarkable in its artistic success, "The Cross of Snow," a heartfelt sonnet so personal in its expression of the poet's grief for his dead wife that it remained unpublished until after Longfellow's death. A professor of modern literature at Harvard College, Longfellow did much to educate the general reading public in the literatures of Europe by means of his many anthologies and translations, the most important of which was his masterful rendition in English of Dante's Divine Comedy (1865-67).
Robert Frost, the quintessential poet of New England, was born in San Francisco in 1874. He was educated at Dartmouth College and Harvard University. Although he managed to support himself working solely as a poet for most of his life and holding various posts with a number of universities, as a young man he was employed as a bobbin boy in a mill, a cobbler, a schoolteacher, and a farmer. Frost, whose poetry focuses on natural images of New England, received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry four times for: New Hampshire, Collected Poems, A Further Range, and A Witness Tree. His works are noted for combining characteristics of both romanticism and modernism. He also wrote A Boy's Will, North of Boston, Mountain Interval, and The Gift Outright, among others. Frost married Elinor Miriam White in 1895, and they had six children--Elliott, Lesley, Carol, Irma, Marjorie, and Elinor Bettina. He died in Boston in 1963.
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