5. A.Thanatopsis
B.Rip van Winkle
C.The Bay Psalm
D. A True
Relation
of…Virginia…ADD A FOOTER 5
A True Relation
of…Virginia…(1608)
-Relates the founding of Jamestown in 1607
-Jamestown was founded primarily by young
men seeking economic success
- Written primarily to attract potential
colonists to America. Promoted America as a
means to individual well-being, liberty, and
improved social status.
BY : John Smith
https://owlcation.com/humanities/Ameri
cas-First-Book-The-Bay-Psalm-Book
6. A.Thanatopsis
B.Rip van Winkle
C.The Bay Psalm
ADD A FOOTER 6
The BAY PSALM BOOK
The Whole Booke of
Psalmes Faithfully
Cambridge,
Massachusetts, in
1640
BY : Richard Mather
https://owlcation.com/humanities/Ameri
cas-First-Book-The-Bay-Psalm-Book
7. -This history of American literature begins with
the arrival of English-speaking Europeans in
what would become the United States.
-At first American literature was naturally a
colonial literature, by authors who were
Englishmen and who thought and wrote as such.
John Smith, a soldier of fortune, is credited with
initiating American literature. His chief books
included A True Relation of…Virginia…(1608)
and The Generall Historie of Virginia, New
England, and the Summer Isles (1624).
7
https://www.britannica.com/art/Ameri
can-literature/Poetry
Only a few of many works
praising America as a land of
economic promise.
8. Pocahontas was a Native American woman
notable for her association with the colonial
settlement at Jamestown, Virginia. She was
the daughter of Powhatan, the paramount
chief of a network of tributary tribes in the
Tsenacommacah, encompassing the
Tidewater region of Virginia.
-She saved John Smith by placing her head
upon his own at the moment of his
execution 8
https://www.britannica.com/art/Ameri
can-literature/Poetry
11. The 18th-century American Enlightenment was a
movement marked by an emphasis on rationality
rather than tradition, scientific inquiry instead of
unquestioning religious dogma, and
representative government in place of monarchy
Words had never been so useful and so
important in human history. People wrote a lot of
political writings. Numerous pamphlets and
printings were published. These works agitated
revolutionary people not only in America but also
around the world. Seeking for justice,
liberty, and equality
11
https://www.britannica.com/art/Ameri
can-literature/Poetry
12. The wrench of the American Revolution
emphasized differences that had been
growing between American and British
political concepts. As the colonists
moved to the belief that rebellion was
inevitable, fought the bitter war, and
worked to found the new nation’s
government, they were influenced by a
number of very effective political writers
12
https://www.britannica.com/art/Ameri
can-literature/Poetry
-Diaries, letters, travel
journals,ships logs, reports
to financial backers.
-England was still in control.
13. = He was the symbol of America in the Age of
Enlightenment (Age of Reason)
=came from a Calvinist background. • He was
born into a poor candle-maker’s family. He had
very little education. He learned in school only for
two years, but he was a voracious reader. At 16,
he began to publish essays under the pseudonym
“Silence Do good”.
=He set himself up as an independent printer and
publisher. In 1727 he founded the Junto club.
13
15. = The first modern American and the country’s last
medieval man.
=He represents the element of piety, the religious
passion, the aspect of emotion and ecstacy, of
New England tradition.
=Was a great deal of a transcendentalist
=His famous work is “The Great Doctrine of
Original Sin Defended” (1758)
15
16. = “Poet of the American Revolution” and “Father
of American Poetry”
=He is the pioneer of the New Romanicism
=He is a radical advocate of political democracy
=he is an original expositer of certain powerful
American political myths: of universal liberty, of the
reasonability of the common man, of the superior
morality of the life of the farmer to that of the
commercial enterpriser
16
17. 17
https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/educational-magazines/thanatopsis
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50465/thanatopsis
The Wild Honeysuckle
Philip Freneau
Fair flower, that dost so comely grow,
Hid in this silent, dull retreat,
Untouched thy honied blossoms blow,
Unseen thy little branches greet:
No roving foot shall crush thee here,
No busy hand provoke a tear.
By Nature's self in white arrayed,
She bade thee shun the vulgar eye,
And planted here the guardian shade,
And sent soft waters murmuring by;
Thus quietly thy summer goes,
Thy days declining to repose.
Smit with those charms, that must decay,
I grieve to see your future doom;
They died—nor were those flowers more gay,
The flowers that did in Eden bloom;
Unpitying frosts and Autumn's power
Shall leave no vestige of this flower.
From morning suns and evening dews
At first thy little being came;
If nothing once, you nothing lose,
For when you die you are the same;
The space between is but an hour,
The frail duration of flower.
19. After the American Revolution, and
increasingly after the War of 1812,
American writers were exhorted to
produce a literature that was truly native.
19
https://www.britannica.com/art/Ameri
can-literature/Poetry
-The theme of the personal journey in regards to
independence.
--Writers desperately wanted to define themselves as
American, and not British, writers
---This period's writers wished to focus upon societies
realism that problems exist within the American
culture.
20. = A New Englander by birth, attracted attention in
his 23rd year when the first version of his poem
“Thanatopsis” (1817) appeared.
= Still later, however, under the influence of
Wordsworth and other Romantics, he wrote nature
lyrics that vividly represented the New England
scene. Turning to journalism, he had a long career
as a fighting liberal editor of The Evening Post. He
himself was overshadowed, in renown at least, by
a native-born New Yorker, Washington Irving.
= Other works: “The Popular History of United
States”, “Among the Trees” , “Forest of Hymn” ,etc.
20
21. 21
• Is one of the earliest poems written by the
nineteenth-century American poet William Cullen
Bryant
• Marked as a new beginning for American poetry
• Thanatopsis is a Greek word that means meditation
on or contemplation of death,
• The poem is an elegy that attempts to console
humans, given that everyone eventually has to die.
• "Thanatopsis" endures because of its sonorous
blank verse and its dignified plea to humans not to
fear death but to trust in the benevolence,
continuity, and harmony of nature https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/e
ducational-magazines/thanatopsis
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/po
ems/50465/thanatopsis
To him who in the love of Nature holds
Communion with her visible forms, she
speaks
A various language; for his gayer
hours
She has a voice of gladness, and a
smile
And eloquence of beauty, and she
glides
Into his darker musings, with a mild
And healing sympathy, that steals
away
Their sharpness, ere he is aware.
When thoughts
Of the last bitter hour come like a
blight
Over thy spirit, and sad images
Of the stern agony, and shroud, and
pall,
And breathless darkness, and the
narrow house,
Make thee to shudder, and grow sick
at heart;—
Go forth, under the open sky, and list
To Nature’s teachings, while from all
around—
Earth and her waters, and the depths
of air—
Comes a still voice—
22. = the youngest member of a prosperous merchant
family, joined with ebullient young men of the town in
producing the Salmagundi papers (1807–08), which satirized
the foibles of Manhattan’s citizenry. This was followed by A
History of New York (1809), by “Diedrich Knickerbocker,” a
burlesque history that mocked pedantic scholarship and
sniped at the old Dutch families.
= Irving’s models in these works were obviously
Neoclassical English satirists, from whom he had learned to
write in a polished, bright style. Later, having met Sir Walter
Scott and having become acquainted with imaginative
German literature, he introduced a new Romantic note in The
Sketch Book (1819–20), Bracebridge Hall (1822), and other
works.
= He was the first American writer to win the
ungrudging (if somewhat surprised) respect of British critics.
22
23. 23
The first American work
to become successful
internationally.
= “The Sketch Book”
That contain His First
American Short stories
• “Rip Van Winkle” (1819)
• “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”
https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/e
ducational-magazines/thanatopsis
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/po
ems/50465/thanatopsis
24. = won even wider fame. Following the pattern of
Sir Walter Scott’s “Waverley” novels, he did his
best work in the “Leatherstocking” tales (1823–
41), a five-volume series celebrating the career of
a great frontiersman named Natty Bumppo.
= His skill in weaving history into inventive plots
and in characterizing his compatriots brought him
acclaim not only in America and England but on
the continent of Europe as well.
24
25. 25
• a five-volume series celebrating the career of a
great frontiersman named Natty Bumppo.
• Natty Bumppo is celebrated for his closeness to
nature
• And is the mouthpiece Cooper uses to decry “the
wasty ways of man” and “the twisty ways of the
law.”
26. = reared in the South, lived and worked as an author and
editor in Baltimore, Philadelphia, Richmond, and New York City.
= His work was shaped largely by analytical skill that
showed clearly in his role as an editor: time after time he gauged
the taste of readers so accurately that circulation figures of
magazines under his direction soared impressively. It showed itself
in his critical essays, wherein he lucidly explained and logically
applied his criteria. His gothic tales of terror were written in
accordance with his findings when he studied the most popular
magazines of the day.
=His work, especially his critical writings and carefully
crafted poems, had perhaps a greater influence in France, where
they were translated by Charles Baudelaire, than in his own
country.
26
27. 27
His masterpieces of terror
• “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839)
• “The Masque of the Red Death” (1842)
• “The Cask of Amontillado” (1846)and others
----were written according to a carefully worked
out psychological method.
His detective stories
“The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841)= which
historians credited as the first of the genre.
As a poet, he achieved fame with “The Raven”
(1845).
28. = the leading New England fictionist of the period .
= His masterpiece
The Scarlet Letter (1850)—were set
against a background of colonial America with
emphasis upon its distance in time from 19th-century
New England.
The House of the Seven Gables
(1851), dealt with the past as well as the present.
The Marble Faun (1860), were set in
distant countries.
=Remote though they were at times from
what Hawthorne called “the light of common day,”
they showed deep psychological insight and probed
into complex ethical problems.
28
30. = An ardent singer of the praise of Manhattan
= He was a believer in Jacksonian democracy, in the
splendour of the common man. He was a working man, a
traveller, a self appointed nurse during the American Civil
War(1861-1865) and a poetic innovator
=Inspired by the Romantic concept of a poet as
prophet and also by the Transcendental philosophy of
Emerson, Whitman in 1855 published the first edition of
Leaves of Grass
------In this poetry collection, Whitman showed the
experiences of the common man. He uses free-flowing verse
and lines of irregular length to depict the al inclusiveness of
American Democracy. Taking that motif one step further, the
poet equates the vast range of American experience with
himself without being egotistical.
30
31. = A shy, playful, odd personality, she allowed
practically none of her writings to be published during
her lifetime. She wrote odd poems
=Not until 1890, four years after her death, was
the first book of her poems published, to be followed
at intervals by other collections. Later poets were to
be influenced by her individual techniques—use of
Like Lanie imperfect, or eye, rhymes, avoidance of
regular rhythms, and a tendency to pack brief stanzas
with cryptic meanings.r, she rediscovered the value of
conceits for setting forth her thoughts and feelings.
31
32. 32
• “The Snake”
• “I Like to See It Lap
the Miles”
• “The Chariot”
• “Farther in Summer
than the Birds”
• “There’s a Certain
Slant of Light”
34. 34
Although in the beginning and in the course of the
20th century books lost some of their influence due
to new forms of mass media like the radio, the
television and recently the internet, American
literature became more and more influential on an
internationale level. By the turn of the century
writers of prose as well as poets and playwrights
were keen on experimenting with new techniques
and topics.
Themes in Modern American Literature: alienation,
transformation, consumption, and the relativity of
truth. These themes reflect the distinct sensibilities
of both the modernist and postmodern aesthetic
movements.
35. = wrote poems with traditional stanzas and a blank verse, a verse in
iambic pentameter with no rhyme.
=His poems poems portray ordinary people in everyday situatuons
like
“Mendel Wall” (1914) - It involves two rural neighbors who one spring
day meet to walk along the wall that separates their properties and repair it
where needed.
“The Road No Taken” (1914)- is an ambiguous poem that allows the reader
to think about choices in life, whether to go with the mainstream or go it
alone. If life is a journey, this poem highlights those times in life when a
decision has to be made.;
and “After Apple-Picking” (1914)- is a curious poem that, on the surface, is
a person thinking out loud, telling a complicated story of the apple harvest
and how their sleep is going to be affected because the work has been
exhausting.
35
36. =The inclusion of his poems in film and music is usually
shorthand for “I am intelligent and sensual, honest.” But when
you read the books, you find he’s not difficult or syrupy. In fact,
he’s not like any other writer at all.
= was known for his unconventional punctuation and phrasing.
His poem were compiled in Complete Poems 1968)
----- It charts early ventures in
modernism through to his most avant-garde experiments with
language. And it gives the impression that he might be the
greatest poet of the last century. 36
38. =was a leader of the imagists, who emphasized the use of
direct and sparse language and precise images in writing
poetry.
= Two of his works are
Ripostes(1912) -is a collection of 25 poems
Lustra (1916) - In his poetry Pound was now able to deal
efficiently with a whole range of human activities and emotions,
without raising his voice. The movement of the words and the
images they create are no longer the secondhand borrowings of
youth or apprenticeship but seem to belong to the observing
intelligence that conjures up the particular work in hand. Many
of the Lustra poems are remarkable for perfectly paced endings
38
39. =use prose using everyday speech.
= His best works appeared in :
- Winesburg, Ohio (1919) -The work is
structured around the life of protagonist George
Willard, from the time he was a child to his
growing independence and ultimate
abandonment of Winesburg as a young man.
- Death In the Woods (1933)
39
40. =was known for his succinct writing, which
was widely imitated.
=His writing was very straightforward and
objective-not verbose and sentimental.
=Two of his finest stories are:
“ The Killers”(1927)- is a story that deals
with the familiar Hemingway themes of
courage, disillusionment, death, and futility
“The Short Happy Life of Francis
Macomber “(1936)
40
41. =was known for his work
“Howl”(1956)---a poem with
incantatory rhythms and raw emotion
---------is a social commentary
and revolutionary manifesto of Beats
generation. The poem relies on
linguistic grandeur, operatic catalogs,
obscene references, and rambling
digressions.
=He was one of the beat poets,
who aimed to bring poetry back to the
streets.
41
42. =become known for his
confessional poetry----a kind
of poetry that deals with the
private experiences of the
speaker.
=Her work Live or Die
(1966) won a Pulitzer Prize
------ is a fictionalized
memoir of her recovery from
mental illness. 42
