American Poetry

Question 1

Who headed the Transcendentalist movement?

Answer 1

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Question 2

“Brahma”: is a poem by?

Answer 2

Emerson

Question 3

What is Brahma about?

Answer 3

“Brahma”: The central speaker of the poem is Brahma Himself, who according to Hindu philosophers of India, is Omnipotent, Omniscient and Omnipresent. The study of the Vedantic philosophy, the Gita, and the Katha Upanishad is impressed upon the poem very forcefully. Body is for some certain period of time but within the body of man there is the soul that is the divine spark, eternal, everlasting and never-ending. It is a part of the Over-Soul who is the supreme God, the Super Power of the Universe.

Question 4

What is Uriel about?

Answer 4

“Uriel”: The poem, describing the “lapse” of Uriel, is regarded as a “poetic summary of many strains of thought in Emerson’s early philosophy”.[1]
“Once, among the Pleiads walking, Sayd overheard the young gods talking; And the treason, too long pent, To his ears was evident. The young deities discussed Laws of form, and metre just, Orb, quintessence, and sunbeams.”
The leader of the speculating young is Uriel, who with “low tones” and “piercing eye” preaches against the presence of lines in nature, thus introducing the idea of progress and the eternal return. A shudder runs through the sky at these words, and “all slid to confusion”.

Question 5

Henry Thoreau was born in?

Answer 5

(1817, Concord, Massachusetts, U.S.—died 1862, Concord),

Transcendentalism

Question 6

Who started the magazine The Dial?

Answer 6

Thoreau

July 1840

Question 7

“Sympathy” and Thoreau’s essay on the Roman poet Aulus Persius Flaccus.

Answer 7

The Dial.

Question 8

Walden was published in?

Answer 8

1854

Question 9

What is Walden about?

Answer 9

Walden is a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings. The work is part personal declaration of independence, social experiment, voyage of spiritual discovery, satire, and—to some degree—a manual for self-reliance.
First published in 1854, Walden details Thoreau’s experiences over the course of two years, two months, and two days in a cabin he built near Walden Pond amidst woodland owned by his friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson, near Concord, Massachusetts. Thoreau used this time to write his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. The experience later inspired Walden, in which Thoreau compresses the time into a single calendar year and uses passages of four seasons to symbolize human development.
The book can be seen as performance art, a demonstration of how easy it can be to acquire the four necessities of life. Once acquired, he believed people should then focus their efforts on personal growth.

Question 10

Walt Whitman was born in?

Answer 10

West Hills, Long Island, New York 1819

Question 11

Leaves of Grass was published in?

Answer 11

1855

sold his house for that

Question 12

Drum-Taps was written by?

Answer 12

It is a collection of War poems by Walt Whitman

Question 13

Poem Beat Beat Drum is about?

Answer 13

“Beat! Beat! Drums!” echoed the bitterness of the first of the battles of Bull Run.

Question 14

Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night” is about?

Answer 14

“Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night” had a new awareness of suffering, no less effective for its quietly plangent quality.

Question 15

The sequel to Drum Taps was published in?

Answer 15

1865

Question 16

“When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” his great elegy on Pres. Abraham Lincoln. Whitman’s horror at the death of democracy’s first “great martyr chief ” were published in?

Answer 16

Sequel to Drum Traps

Question 17

Leaves of Grass was about

Answer 17

Leaves of Grass, went through nine editions,
Under the influence of the Romantic movement in literature and art, Whitman held the theory that the chief function of the poet was to express his own personality in his verse..
In Leaves of Grass he addressed the citizens of the United States, urging them to be large and generous in spirit, a new race nurtured in political liberty, and possessed of united souls and bodies.
It was partly in response to nationalistic ideals and partly in accord with his ambition to cultivate and express his own personality that the “I” of Whitman’s poems asserted a mythical strength and vitality. For the frontispiece to the first edition, Whitman used a picture of himself in work clothes, posed nonchalantly with cocked hat and hand in trouser pocket, as if illustrating a line in his leading poem, “Song of Myself”: “I cock my hat as I please indoors and out.” In this same poem he also characterized himself as:

Question 18

What is Song of Myself about?

Answer 18

Whitman emphasized an all-powerful “I” who serves as narrator. The “I” tries to relieve both social and private problems by using powerful affirmative cultural images. The emphasis on American culture helped reach Whitman’s intention of creating a distinctly American epic poem comparable to the works of Homer.

Question 19

Emiley Dickenson was born in?

Answer 19

December 10, 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts, US

Question 20

How many poems by Dickenson were published in her lifetime?

Answer 20

10 in 1800

Question 21

I’m Nobody! Who are you?” is a poem by?

Answer 21

Emilie Dickenson

Question 22

I’m Nobody! Who are you?” is about?

Answer 22

This poem opens with a literally impossible declaration—that the speaker is “Nobody.” This nobody-ness, however, quickly comes to mean that she is outside of the public sphere; perhaps, here Dickinson is touching on her own failure to become a published poet, and thus the fact that to most of society, she is “Nobody.”
The speaker does not seem bitter about this—instead she asks the reader, playfully, “Who are you?,” and offers us a chance to be in cahoots with her (“Are you – Nobody – Too?”). In the next line, she assumes that the answer to this question is yes, and so unites herself with the reader (“Then there’s a pair of us!”), and her use of exclamation points shows that she is very happy to be a part of this failed couple.

Question 23

“Because I could not stop for Death” is about?

Answer 23

–” In this poem, Dickinson’s speaker is communicating from beyond the grave, describing her journey with Death, personified, from life to afterlife. In the opening stanza, the speaker is too busy for Death (“Because I could not stop for Death), so Death—“kindly”—takes the time to do what she cannot, and stops for her.

Question 24

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening is a poem by?

Answer 24

Robert Frost
published in 1923 in his New Hampshire volume. Imagery, personification, and repetition are prominent in the work. In a letter to Louis Untermeyer, Frost called it “my best bid for remembrance”.

Question 25

Summary of Stopping by Woods?

Answer 25

The poem is most often read as the poet/narrator’s admission of having experienced depression and a vivid description of what that experience feels like. In this particular reading of the poem, “the night” is the depression itself, and the narrator describes how he views the world around him in this state of mind. Although he is in a city, he feels completely isolated from everything around him.

Question 26

Which collection was seized by San Francisco police and US customs?

Answer 26

Howl
Published in 1956
It became a part of Obscenity trial.

Question 27

Shaker, Why Don’t You Sing? is a collection by?

Answer 27

Maya Angelou

Question 28

Still I Rise is a poem by?

Answer 28

Maya Angelou, “Still I Rise”
Tied with Angelou’s theme of racism is her treatment of the struggle and hardships experienced by her race. Neubauer analyzes two poems in Diiie, “Times-Square-Shoeshine-Composition” and “Harlem Hopscotch”, that support her assertion that for Angelou, “conditions must improve for the black race