Poets and Poetry
I would propose, in the following sequence describing poets, to characterize the role of poets (good poets) in embodying the society they inhabit through recording, preserving, and advancing the language of their time, with its foibles and its triumphs. Students should quickly realize that not every generation of poets is pioneering in its spirit; some poet are preservationists and conservative, as befits their time and age, while others deliberately stand apart and in the forefront of their era—distinguishing and isolating themselves (at times) from their contemporaries and (by extension, sometimes) us. At all times, however, regardless of the similarities in themes and some of the tropes or devices, students should recognize that each successive generation inevitably reflected their circumstances and opportunities.
Early American Poets
One of the foremost challenges of early American poetry can be allusions and diction which appear arcane or senseless to students. But the sonnet uniquely encapsulates a teachable number of thoughts and ideas and transparently attempts a comprehensive expression of authorial intent or interests. Students can recognize the form, or at least perceive a sense of déja-vu somewhere between the first and fourteenth lines. My hope is to craft a concluding unit in American Literature that focuses on the sonnet as a reflection of the ways in which American artists express the changing face and focus of America and Americans, politically and socially. When the form allows, as this one does, for reading and re-reading, the difficulties of proper nouns, allusions to past literature, and archaisms even in these early sonnets can be opportunities for study rather than insuperable obstacles.
Royall Tyler
I include Royall Tyler's "Sonnet to an Old Mouser" as an early example of the American sonnet. It is a good starting point as a very conventional sonnet that adheres to ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. Royal Tyler very capably imitates a Shakespearean sonnet using Elizabethan form. Tyler is a gentleman of letters and prospective son-in-law to President John Adams. One of the first literary figures, Tyler established his name in drama and dabbled in verse—all while serving in a variety of governmental roles ranging from attorney at law to State Attorney General of Vermont. American letters in this era were imitative of neo-classical Britain and were a secondary pursuit for many of the poets who produced them. I will remind students that the most popular works of the early American era were political pamphlets and speeches. Historians such as Thomas Bailey observe that perhaps no other popular culture ever subsumed itself so thoroughly in a wave of pamphlets and political writings as did the early Americans of the eighteenth century. As a consequence, a modest sonnet like this particular one would reflect democratic ideals and [celebrate] non-aristocratic subject matter. For contrast and complement, I will also refer students back to a contemporary, Phyllis Wheatley, whose ode to George Washington likewise shows a backward glance towards British form while focusing on people who break the mold as subjects for Pindaric Odes. Royall Tyler will ground students in a sense of verse as pastime, secondary to the business and ideals which dominated the age of the Revolutionary War and its aftermath.
Edgar Allan Poe
Students will know Poe extremely well through prior exposure in English 3 to "Annabel Lee," "The Raven," "Fall of the House of Usher," and his "Philosophy of Composition." Poe's sonnets "Enigmas" and "Sonnet to Silence" show a very familiar poet in another guise, that of parody. Critical in this reading of Poe's sarcasm is the sonnet's subject, which is a joke name: "there is no Solomon Don Dunce" any more than there is a Keyser Soize in The Usual Suspects or George Kaplan in North by Northwest. Poe makes him (Solomon Don Dunce) up, but critiques the critic of sonnets. What the students will likely remark is the play on names that fills out the meter and the verse, as well as the hidden name in "Enigmas." Likewise, Poe plays with the trope of sonnets immortalizing their subjects. In being preserved this way, Solomon (as a character) might meet the same fate as Fortunato in Cask of Amontillado.
Poe was a poet of the imagination and one who saw himself (and was characterized by others) as a belletrist. Poe self-consciously cultivated cultural preciousness because he reacted against the anti-poetic nature of America, though he sometimes took his reaction to extremes. Students should observe [that] his foreign phrases and his allusions to Italian and French history are things that set him apart from his contemporaries as much as they set him apart from themselves (the students). As Roy Harvey Pearce observed, Poe belonged to a group of up and coming poets who saw themselves as "above the run-of-the-mill reader, men of taste and high opinion…they declared that they were not afraid of the literary life and its adventures into the world of the imagination." 10
The American Renaissance
This provides the first major transition between earlier and later forms of poetry and also the beginning of the divide between formalists and rebels in American letters. On the one hand stand Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman, who will embrace non-conformity, the desire to establish a new agenda for a national culture that is separate and distinct from old world forms, and who freely sought to break through boundaries rather than operate within them. As Roy Harvey Pearce remarks in The Continuity of American Poetry when talking about Lowell and Longfellow, "They could not avoid seeing that Poe, Emerson, and Whitman were as much rejected by American culture as they—to a degree, in spite of themselves—rejected it." 11 And now, distinctly, students can see contemporaries begin to diverge in both form and content.
Whitman
In the shorter verse of "Captain my Captain" the simultaneous operation within a more formal verse form of adherence to and experimentation with form both emerge. Although it is not truly a sonnet, "O Captain My Captain" shows Whitman detaching himself from the self-reflective mode of "Song of Myself" and [turning his focus through the discipline of form] onto the figure of Abraham Lincoln. This poem offers a two-fold alternative glance at Whitman: he still retains the strong current of passion and emotion that animate his magnum opus, but is now able to constrain an emotion, unrelieved sorrow over the death of Lincoln. As in another Whitman poem they will cover earlier in the year, "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," they will also see the contrast between a sense of crossing as eternal and restorative versus the crossing that has been achieved through the [leadership] of Lincoln. There are sharply different elements here, and a sense of limits or (at very least) uncertainty they will not have witnessed before in Whitman.
What they will additionally be able to witness is Whitman's ability to achieve the Romantic goal of transforming the natural and everyday into something elevated, as a Hegelian synthesis. His poetry indicates neither the denial nor abjuring of the everyday that Poe might prefer nor a colossus of self-involvement; they will see a Transcendentalist at work. As Pearce observes about Whitman, "he would create other persons like himself—in effect, save them from that anti-poetic world to which the demands of their workaday life commit them," 12 In a poem such as "Captain my Captain" Whitman elevates himself through focus on the common man (Lincoln) who elevated himself as well
Bryant
William Cullen Bryant, together with James Russell Lowell, James Greenleaf Whittier, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, comprise the "fireside poets." Much is made of their divergence from Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, and Dickinson. Though they were not stylistic revolutionaries like the others, I include them to serve as counterbalance and contrast to the luminaries among the Transcendentalists. "Ordinary American readers needed poets who would speak to them in their own language." 13 They further spoke to ordinary Americans with a resounding optimism about home, hearth, country, and future prosperity. Contrasted with writers such as Dickinson, Whitman, and Emerson, however, the fireside poets understood how the literary giants of the American Renaissance set themselves apart from mainstream American culture, of which they themselfes were to some extent a part. Pearce comments that James Russell Lowell, in writing on Whitman and Emerson, "could not avoid seeing that (they) were as much rejected by American culture as they—to a degree, in spite of themselves—rejected it." 14 The fireside poets figuratively cut the scale of American letters down to the size of the American audience they served; they comforted Americans with a sense of their own ability and merit as they were—not as they might aspire to be in transcending boundaries.
Bryant embodies this with his sonnet "To an American Painter Departing for Europe" where he engages his friend Thomas Cole in an argument over the supposed superiorities and greater purity of American landscapes than those he will find. He lapses, however, into hyperbole—being at once someone echoing Emerson's national cultural pride while departing from Thoreau's skepticism (as seen in "Civil Disobedience") and Emerson's open-mindedness. Bryant also concludes his poem with a deeper plunge into unabashed sentimentalism than even Whitman will normally allow himself: "Gaze on them, till the tears shall dim thy sight." 15 Bryant assumes that, while Cole witnesses Alpine sights and a European landscape, the memory of American grandeur will automatically restrain Cole's preference for anything but American vistas. The close friendship between the painter and the poet was also a dialogue, with Cole's painting "The Oxbow" depicting his view of American landscape—one which acknowledged beauty but also the incursion and progress of civilization, a natural setting that could be corrupted or changed by human progress as readily and effectively as anything depicted in his allegorical works "The Course of Empire: the Savage State" or "The Course of Empire: Destruction." At work in Bryant's sonnet to Cole, consequently, is a degree of self-satisfaction and of self-delusion—an aspect of the American political character which students can witness in other literary products as well.
Longfellow
As the most popular poet of his time, Longfellow provides an interesting counterpoint to Whitman. While both write about nature in their poetry, Longfellow's sonnet "Nature" can stand as a contrast to Emerson's conception of it, Thoreau's conception of it, and especially Whitman's. Contrast his concluding lines "As a fond mother when the day is o'er/ Leads by the hand her little child to bed, /Half willing, half reluctant to be led," 16 with those of Whitman in "Leaves of Grass": "All goes onward and outward—nothing collapses; / and to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier." 17 Longfellow requires a discussion about the place of domesticity, because two such divergent views reflect the breadth of American thought on a primal subject and theme. Longfellow also reflects a different sensibility on another basic and elemental topic, that of love, in "The Cross of Snow," which reflects on his wife who died when her dress caught on fire and she was irretrievably burned in the process.
Robinson
Edward Arlington Robinson helps bring the transition from American Renaissance and the Romantic and Transcendentalist tradition through the Gilded Age to the turn of the century. What the "fireside" poets saw as the reasonable desire of the public to be comforted and reassured now finds frays and cracks in Edwin Arlington Robinson's sonnets, "Modernities" and "Afterthoughts." Robinson attempted to carry on the tradition of Whitman and Longfellow and to speak—as a true Romantic—the language of the people he knew that lived everyday life. My students will have read "Richard Cory" and "Luke Havergal," and gained a sense of his small town associations which are increasingly fragmenting and showing the dissolution of community in the face of progress, technology, modernity, Modernities factor in the poem like a very real nemesis: "With infinite unseen enemies in the way." 18 Robinson alerts his audience to a new threat—"the intangible." Though he keeps perfect sonnet form, the subject itself begins to lose stability.
Lazarus
Transition to Emma Lazarus, especially from Edward Arlington Robinson, would mark the transition and impact of the Civil War as well as the transformation of American and modern life from a natural and agrarian setting to one more urban and at odds with classical leanings and allusions—the example of Robinson's "Modernities" and "Afterthoughts" witnessing tension between the learned and the everyday and the aspiration for a golden age which the prior era of American poet might have dismissed as imitative shackles. Lazarus's "New Colossus" offsets these cultural feelings] with decidedly new perspectives and personae, and introduces the use of sonnet as historical and sociological commentary on contemporary events and personages. Whereas Robinson looks backwards into the small towns and villages of the Midwest, Lazarus emerges from over the Atlantic and bears with her a new spirit of optimism and new capacity for seeing grandeur in the familiar—the city of New York, the West, and the experience of an urban landscape that older poets consider emblems of self-destruction or corruption.
From Lazarus we get: "Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!...Give me your tired, your poor" 19 Lazarus splays out the function of the sonnet and the voice of America like an accordion after compression and shows how poetry can once again adopt and address public topics. Helen Vendler comments on the perpetual difficulty in melding public and private purpose in poetry when describing lyric poetry: "No single description fits all lyrics but I will proceed on the assumption that the purpose of the lyric, as a genre, is to represent an inner life in such a manner that is assumable by others." 20 Vendler addresses a topic that Lazarus clearly takes on: how to combine private reflection with a larger idealistic testament. Lazarus had been that tired and weary member of the huddled mass while simultaneously speaking for America, lending America a voice as a protagonist who counters the voice of Europe.
Paul Dunbar
Born to two ex-slaves, Dunbar almost stands a companion to the growing ranks of immigrants in his unique status as one of the first generations of African American males born free. As a consequence, he assumes a different role than prior African American poets. As critic John Lowney remarks, he "grew away from the stature of the exotic, the accidentally unusual Negro, the talented tenth." Dunbar forcefully employs the Petrarchan sonnet to critique history, specifically and surprisingly that of the divided African American leadership in the wake of Plessey v. Ferguson, as well as taking on a white abolitionist icon in Robert Gould Shaw, who led the 55 th Massachusetts infantry (in which Dunbar's father served). Akin to Milton and Wordsworth before him, he can use the sonnet to laud as well as lament the role of historical figures (Douglass figures as a virtual Lincoln to the African-American people—his departure depriving them of the stature they need) whereas he takes a far different tack with Shaw, blasting him for mishandling his talents and his opportunity for elevating the African-American people. Dunbar uses the concision of the sonnet to highlight the contrast between "hot terror of this hopeless fight" and the "slow steady blaze of learning's light." The sonnet allows him to display this contrast to his readers—alliterating both options to show their lyric equity but measuring as far more valuable the educational opportunity that Shaw sacrificed for glory and certain death.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Born in Maine, she stands as an inheritor of the New England tradition, but represents a departure; she uses the sonnet—perhaps better than most poets of her generation—while simultaneously subverting it; she turns Petrarchan conventions to her own ends with the sonnet, much as did Shakespeare and in a Shakespearean way. Poems such as "Only until this cigarette is ended" and "Love is blind" play freely with the conceits of Shakespearean sonnets—touching on themes of love and the permanence afforded lovers and objects through the sonnet. Only this time, what she immortalizes is love's impermanence or, if it is permanent—the obvious impermanence of any one object of that love. She brings to bear some of the same ironies as Shakespeare with lines like that within "Only until this cigarette is ended" when she tells her lover she can forget his face 'The colour and the features, every one, / The words not ever…" 21 The physical, as in Elizabethan tradition, remains ephemeral but the words (hallmark of her talent and utility as a poet) never fade—as though her description of him is that of which (in a divorce) she would sue for custody.
Gwendolyn Brooks
Like Dunbar, Brooks represents a new generation of African American poets that has always known freedom—though seldom equality. Like Lazarus, she hails from an urban environment, one now centered in the heart of the country: Chicago. What she brings to the sonnet is dialect and vivid imagery communicating the heat, the play, and the life of the city. Rather than abhorring of the creep of modernity, many sonnets like "The Rites for Cousin Vit" celebrate the dance, the music, the alcoholic smear of 'bad wine across her shantung." 22 The city and urban life no longer figure as the express enemy.
Strangely enough, Brooks brings in an unexpectedly political enemy: World War II. In her poems "The Sonnet-Ballad" and "Gay Chaps at the Bar" she uses the Shakespearean sonnet in a sort of reverse St. Crispian's Day speech. Her heroines clearly understand the paradox of young African-American men going off to fight a war to rid the war of fascism abroad while Jim Crow rages at home. The protagonist in "Sonnet Ballad" shows how the war becomes personified as the mistress who—even if she doesn't steal the protagonist's man, will certainly emasculate him, so that he will "now hesistate—and change" and he will be the one to "stammer" yes. Brooks foresees the terrible emasculating power of war.
Robert Lowell
The final poet offered to students would be Robert Lowell. In some senses he fits perfectly because (à la Nathaniel Hawthorne) his family is steeped in a multi-century historical association with Massachusetts, and he himself, in this history-capping unit on the American sonnet, was more conscious of history than almost any poet of his generation. Lowell's sense of history lies imbedded in a dual identity—that of one of the founding families of Massachusetts (colonial and industrial revolutionaries) as well as one of the most venerable literary families (including James Russell Lowell and Amy Lowell).
Robert Lowell demonstrates in his life, however, that a poet can oscillate between two extremes of historical memory—too much and not enough. Critic Richard Terdiman claimed that many peoples' reaction to the French Revolution had correlatively witnessed a profound sense of estrangement from the past, "a sense that their past had somehow evaded memory [and] that recollection had ceased to integrate with consciousness." 23 Lowell often despised his family's past, considering them (his forefathers) to be Indian-killers. Nevertheless, in his own life, that selfsame righteousness could absent itself. He ranged from activism to apathy—both marching with Eugene McCarthy and (famously) not voting in the 1968 elections. What two of his political poems from this era ("The Restoration" and "RFK") show is the variety of responses by Lowell to events of 1968—on the one hand ambivalence and a degree of dismay at the Columbia protest/takeover and elegiac tones that lend national tragic character to his mourning for Robert F. Kennedy.
Strategies
Incorporating academic literacy skills into each lesson is essential to my students' success. This is especially true for my ELL students as well as those mainstreamed students who may need additional accommodations according to their IEP. The use of these strategies will be essential for students to understand the reading and writing assignments. Central to my teaching of this unit will be, first, establishing the academic vocabulary requisite for close study of poetry as detailed below.
Vocabulary Development
Vocabulary development activities help to highlight the most important words for covering the study of the sonnet. These activities will help students to internalize the terms essential to analyze poetry at a basic level as well as helping in the pursuit of their own verse production. I will be following the prescription of Robert Marzano's research as indicated in his book Building Academic Vocabulary by:
- Identifying essential vocabulary for this unit (likely terms pertaining to form, rhyme scheme and literary devices) and teaching those terms explicitly. This will include narrowing the terms to those which are critical to understanding the form of the sonnet and the variations that characterize most sonnets (Elizabethan, Petrarchan, and Spenserian). For each of the critical terms I will provide multiple examples.
- I will have students paraphrase those same terms so that they can begin to show their proficiency with the language of the sonnet and the devices that give it potency and nuance. The students will exchange their own paraphrases so that the entire class can establish the technical language solidly within their own explanations and conversations.
- Have students provide a meaningful visual interpretation and written explanation for what the poetic terms related to the sonnet mean to them. I will include a number of non-representational images or media that will force the students to provide an explanation that demonstrates their understanding of terms like enjambment, trochee, spondee, slant rhyme, etc.
- The students will then perform focused study on discrete numbers of terms with a number of poems so that they can share their observations on the effectiveness of poets' use of particular literary devices and manipulation of the sonnet form. They will likely have to establish a range of performance among multiple poets (who use some of the same devices or utilize particular forms of the sonnet) in order to establish the student's sense of their own (now better informed) taste in poetry.
- The students will conclude their assimilation of poetic terms by describing their preference among the sonnet writers we cover through exercises such as parodies or sample lyrics of praise or critique. In the vein of Billy Collin's self-referential sonnet on the sonnet form, students will be encouraged to write playfully about their understanding of the form, giving notable examples and taking the opportunity to reveal to their classmates (and themselves) what attracts them as readers to a piece of verse.
Identifying similarities and differences
I will stress throughout the unit, the continuous need to identify similarity in the topics and themes of different sonneteers in American Literature. Students will use graphic organizers to systemically group various sonnets by those commonalities and then distinguish how those sonnets still differ as a function of different eras. Using the selfsame organizers, they will mark out the differences in both historical contexts of similarly themed sonnets as well as the evidence of different authorial tone and perspective due to authorial background and ideology. I will also ask students to include important precursors and influences on each sonneteer to inform their analysis as to the source and variety of difference.
Cooperative Learning
Most of the students' mastery of poetic terminology will come through peer-editing and sharing of notes on the various types of sonnets and what devices and strategies poets use to communicate their ideas through the sonnet. Students will also peer-edit and review extensively in exercises such as imitation sonnet-writing and literary analysis of contemporary sonnets. I intend to mix and match students who have complementary strengths and interests in dealing with textual and non-linguistic representation so that all students can develop depth and breadth in their comprehension and analysis of poetry within a cultural context. Some students will more readily make instructive associations between music and poetry, imagery and poetry, while others will more rapidly and adroitly highlight elements of syntax and diction within the sonnets themselves.
Imitation
Working in pairs, the students will have to produce an imitation of at least two of the sonnets covered in the unit. They will perform the imitation by writing it in no fewer than three drafts—each of which will require a requisite number of changes (they don't have to lead off with an entirely replicated sonnet) in the first draft.
Connection with contextual media
Students will pore over and sort through the contextual media that was used as a background lesson and they will select items that match up most precisely with individual sonnets. They will have to make a case for their selections through a short written characterization of their media item as a museum artifact or as captioned photo, painting or illustration "designed" to accompany the sonnet.
This type of work will require students to perform focused research or investigation through historical background material and databases. Using the prior strategies for connecting imagery and music to verse, they will now have to demonstrate close familiarity with a small number of poems and make deliberate choices for connection based on the author's stated purpose, established diction and choice of subjects for their sonnets, biographical information and geographical and historical context to establish relevance that can be substantiated to their peers and to their instructor.
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