Word, Birth, and Culture: The Poetry of Poe, Whitman, and Dickinson

Word, Birth, and Culture: The Poetry of Poe, Whitman, and Dickinson

Document Type

Book

Files

Description

Poe, Whitman, and Dickinson form an engaging triad of poets who, considered together, enrich the poetics of each other; the works of the three poets address language, birth, and scientific aspects of culture in ways that frame new perceptions of sex roles. Exacerbating 19th-century American expectations for sexually-constructed experience, they employ tactics that disrupt patriarchal signification. The first book to group these three poets together, this volume examines the daring language experiments in which they engage. It explores their use of pseduoscientific and scientific studies of alchemy, hydropathy, and botany to inform their understanding of language and birth and to discover expressions that challenge expectations for 19th-century poetry.

The rising awareness of women's rights, which concurred with the antebellum call for a new American literature, also informed the emerging sense of the feminine that prompts the poets to use the maternal in their poetry. While they do not address the woman question of the 19th century in concrete ways, they nonetheless relied upon the female experience of birthing to create a new relationship with language and to question the nature of signification.

ISBN

978-0313322341

Publication Date

7-30-2002

Publisher

Greenwood Press

City

Westport

Disciplines

English Language and Literature

Citation for published book

Wardrop, Daneen. Word, Birth, and Culture : The Poetry of Poe, Whitman, and Dickinson / Daneen Wardrop. 2002. Print. Contributions to the Study of American Literature, No. 14.

Word, Birth, and Culture: The Poetry of Poe, Whitman, and Dickinson

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