1. Emily Elizabeth Dickinson (1830 – May 15, 1886) was an American poet. Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts. Although part of a prominent family with strong ties to its community, Dickinson lived much of her life in reclusive isolation. While Dickinson was a prolific private poet, fewer than a dozen of her nearly 1,800 poems were published during her lifetime. The work that was published during her lifetime was usually altered significantly by the publishers to fit the conventional poetic rules of the time. Dickinson's poems are unique for the era in which she wrote; they contain short lines, typically lack titles, and often use slant rhyme as well as unconventional capitalization and punctuation. Many of her poems deal with themes of death and immortality, two recurring topics in letters to her friends.
2. Walt Whitman (1819-1892) was born on Long Island, New York, into a Quaker family. Whitman had very little education, but the taught himself by reading and writing and by learning from life. He left school at the age of eleven and became an office boy. Later on he changed several jobs, working as a shopkeeper, an apprentice to a printer and an editor of various newspapers. A variety of jobs and first-hand knowledge of life and people offered great help with his writing. In 1848 Whitman began to write poetry. In 1855, he published his first edition of Leaves of Grass, which contains only 12 of his best poems. The collection was soon enlarged into 32 poems. In his life, he wrote over 400 poems. He continued expanding and revising it until his death in 1892. Walt Whitman was one of the great innovators and pioneers in American poetry. His greatest contribution to American literature is the use of free verse, which has no regular meter, rhythm, or line length. He creates a rhythm that depends on natural speech rhythms. He is called “ the father of free verse ”.
3. Robert Lee Frost, an American poet, is honored for his colloquial rhythms, his clarity of diction, his simplicity of images, and his realistic description of rural life. He received four Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry (1924, 1931, 1937, and 1943).
Playing the rhythms of ordinary speech against formal patterns of line and verse, Frost achieved an internal dynamic in his poems. Through the description of landscape and everyday events, Frost managed to probe into the depths of life and social or philosophical problems. Lyric poems such as Mending Wall, The Road Not Taken, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, and Death of the Hired Man were counted among Frost best-known poems.
4. Free Verse is a term used to describe the poems of Walt Whitman and other poets whose verse is based not on the recurrence of stress accent in a regular, strictly measurable pattern, but rather on the irregular rhythmic cadence of the recurrence, with variations, of significant phrases, image patterns, and the like. Free Verse treats the device of rhyme with a similar freedom and irregularity. Whenever a persistent irregularity of the metrical pattern is established in a poem, it can justly be called free verse. During the twentieth century free verse has become so common as to have some claim to being the characteristic verse form of the age.
5. Romanticism: Romanticism (also known as the Romantic era) was an artistic, literary, musical and intellectual movement that originated in Europe toward the end of the 18th century, and in most areas was at its peak in the approximate period from 1800 to 1850. Romanticism was characterized by its emphasis on emotion and individualism as well as glorification of all the past and nature, preferring the medieval rather than the classical. It was partly a reaction to the Industrial Revolution, the aristocratic social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment, and the scientific rationalization of nature—all components of modernity. It was embodied most strongly in the visual arts, music, and literature, but had a major impact on historiography, education, the social sciences, and the natural sciences. It had a significant and complex effect on politics, with romantic thinkers influencing liberalism, radicalism, conservatism and nationalism.
6. A rhyme scheme is the pattern of rhymes at the end of each line of a poem or song. It is usually referred to by using letters to indicate which lines rhyme; lines designated with the same letter all rhyme with each other.
7. An aphorism is a short statement that express a true or wise idea. The meaning of an aphorism should be so broad that it comes across as folklore or established wisdom rather than personal observation. The expression should be compressed beyond the point of immediate accessibility, for an aphorism requires figuring out and thus promotes reflection. Whatever its form, an aphorism should have three qualities (evident in many Dickinson poems): generalization, compression, and memorability.
8. A metaphor is a figure of speech that directly refers to one thing by mentioning another for rhetorical effect. It may provide clarity or identify hidden similarities between two ideas. Antithesis, hyperbole, metonymy and simile are all types of metaphor. In this Chapter, metaphor is used in all the poems we learn.
1. free verse
2. Because I Could Not Stop for Death
3. 1915, 1945
4. intellectual movement
5. aphorism
1. As one of Frost’s most popular works, The Road Not Taken is particularly attractive in its imaginative way of describing the dilemma in making decisions. Diverged roads in the woods are metaphors for the alternative choices in one’s life. It seems impossible to make a distinction between the two paths, because “both that morning equally lay/In leaves no step had trodden black.” The identical paths symbolize freedom to choose in one’s life but either path leads to a correspondingly resultant fate: the traveler is free to choose, but he has no exact idea what lies before him whichever path he takes. Ironically, the traveler seems to foresee that in the future he might regret and betray his today’s choice, as is implied in the poem “I shall be telling this with a sigh/Somewhere ages and ages hence.” Therefore, “I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.” In this way, the poem symbolically reveals America’s individualist spirit of adventure. The traveler took the more challenging way, the one less traveled by, and only after his choice the two paths are different.
At the end of the poem is a imagination about future：the writer waled along the other road of the two, as proper and reasonable as the choice of the first, perhaps more attractive and charming, which deserves more attention, because it is covered with grass and not quite worn, for few travelers had trodden it, so he can’t come back to his origin to restart a new journey. The endless journey was waiting for him..
2. Dickinson’s famous poem “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” draws on the sentimental idea of death as a gentle lover escorting his love to a new and blissful home. This poem is a brilliant, extraordinary lyric. It is well constructed, easily understood, and filled with many poetic conventions. The poem mainly focuses on two themes: death and eternity. Death is imagined to be a gentleman who connects with immortality. And the writer herself, as an innocent girl, was moved by the manners of that gentleman -- death. Finally, she and her companion eternity get into the carriage of death. In the whole poem, there is no horrible existence. On the contrary, everything is so quiet, harmonious and warm. It reveals the calm acceptance of life with dignity, grace and how it is welcomed rather feared.
3. “O Captain! My Captain!” is an elegy written in 1865, to mourn the death of Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president of the United States, who was assassinated on April 14, 1865, five days after the termination of the Civil War.
In this poem, poet used the “captain” to symbolize Lincoln and the United States of America is represented by the “ship”. The leader is being conceived as the brave captain of a ship who falls dead on the deck just when the journey is over and the victory is won. Whitman delivers the message to the captain and declares that their fearful and dangerous trip is done. The ship has experienced severe obstacles such as the Civil War. Finally under the lead of Abraham Lincoln, the unions won the war and abolished the slavery. When everything is over, there is peace. However, the captain was dead at the sea, so the speaker felt bittersweet about the victory.