James Baquet

    Ming sees his classmate Mark in the common room of their dorm.

    Ming: Hey, Mark. Remember when we were talking about American short-story writers?

    Mark: Sure! Twain, Hawthorne, Hemingway — those guys.

    Ming: Yeah. But one of the names kept bothering me, and I finally figured out why. He’s also a poet!

    Mark: Let me think... Do you mean Edgar Allan Poe?

    Ming: That’s right! His long poem, “The Raven,” is one of my favorites.

    Mark: I remember it well.

    “Once upon a midnight dreary,

    “while I pondered, weak and weary...”

    Ming: It’s super-creepy.

    Mark: Sure. It has the same feeling as some of his stories.

    Ming: While I was checking him out, I found a few other American poets from the 19th century.

    Mark: Let me guess: Was one of them Emily Dickinson?

    Ming: That’s right. She was weird.

    Mark: Listen, almost every poet is — let’s just say — “a little different.”

    Ming: I understand, but she was some kind of recluse, right? Locked up in her room? And some of her poems are really morbid.

    Mark: I can think of one...

    “Because I could not stop for Death/He kindly stopped for me/The Carriage held but just Ourselves/And Immortality.”

    Ming: Yeah, that’s one of the scary ones. It ends at her grave!

    Mark: “We paused before a House that seemed/A Swelling of the Ground...”

    Ming: You really know that poem well!

    Mark: I like Dickinson because her poems are easy to memorize.

    Ming: I also found out about a really crazy guy.

    Mark: Ah, Walt Whitman! He was well-known as a sort of “wild man.” Who else would say,

    “I celebrate myself, and sing myself,/And what I assume you shall assume,/For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”

    Ming: Seems a little egocentric.

    Mark: But celebrating the individual marks him as a very Western thinker. He was writing at a time of great optimism in America, ultimately marred by America’s Civil War.

    Ming: Yeah, it was quite a period in your history.

    Mark: The 19th century was a time when America’s identity was being formed — it was still a very young country.

    Ming: I think Longfellow’s poems were part of that movement, right?

    Mark: They sure were. They seem a little corny now, but they really helped set the scene. One of his best-known poems was a tribute to the Native Americans.

    Ming: “The Song of Hiawatha?”

    Mark: Yeah. It’s really long, but one famous section starts,/On the shores of Gitche Gumee,/Of the shining Big-Sea-Water...”

    Ming: What’s “Gitche Gumee?”

    Mark: It was Longfellow’s way of writing the Indian name of Lake Superior.