Response Question 1 - Whitman and Dickinson

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Posted 1/20/03 - Due 1/27/03

Reflect on your readings of Whitman and Dickinson, two poets of the same period whose places in the culture differed greatly.   From a cultural perspective, do you see their works as reinforcing or challenging social ideas of their time? Use this question (and the broad cultural questions below) to briefly compare the two poets. You could discuss their forms, themes, subjects, or other issues of interest to you. If it helps, you may choose to confine your thinking to just two poems.

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  1. What kinds of behavior, what models of practice, does this work seem to enforce?
  2. Why might readers at a particular time and place find this work compelling?
  3. Are there differences between my values and the values implicit in the work I am reading?
  4. Upon what social understandings does the work depend? [i.e. what ideas about the world, social order, history are taken as a given?]
  5. Whose freedom of thought or movement might be constrained [or unleashed] implicitly or explicitly by this work?
  6. What are the larger social structures with which these particular acts of praise or blame might be connected? (226)