compare two poetry works given in the description
Write an essay on one of the following topics. Keep in mind that this is primarily a poetry assignment, and you are expect to not only to quote your evidence, but to analyze it in detail. For this reason, you should concentrate on one fairly brief example from each author and refer to other passages only insofar as they allow you to support or develop your argument.
1. Thoreau, Emerson and Whitman both address, directly or indirectly, what they take to be a crisis in the relationship between the citizen and his or her government. Compare Whitman to one of the two other authors on this issue and evaluate through close analysis the solutions, political and literary, each proposes.
2. Discuss the poet’s relation to nature in the work of two of the following three authors: Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson. What are the similarities and differences in their ideas about the relation between nature and poetic form? How are the differences related to differences in style?
3. Dickinson and Emerson extol solitude; Whitman is often a poet of the city and the crowd. Discuss the social and/or urban element in Whitman’s poetry in comparison to one of his contemporaries. Is Whitman’s sociality a rejection of Emersonian ideals or an extension of them?
(pick any of the 3 and create a thesis based on the topic, must answer the questions addressed within the topic)
The works are:
Henry David Thoreau, “Resistance to Civil Government”
James Madison, Federalist 10
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Poet”
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass: “Song of Myself”
Emily Dickinson, Poems, 319-20, 396-413, 764
