TEXT: Whitman, “I Hear America Singing” (1860)
- Eleven line free verse poem added to the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass in a section entitled, “Chants Democratic”
- Whitman identifies multiple occupations across the emerging industrial American order: mechanics, carpenters, masons, boatmen, deckhands, shoemakers, hatters, wood-cutters, ploughboys, mothers, wives, sewing women, and washer women
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825-1911) was one of the most prolific black writers, poets and activists of nineteenth-century America. She was born free in Maryland in 1825 but orphaned at a young age and raised by her aunt and uncle. Harper began publishing poetry in her early 20s. By the 1850s, she had become a leading abolitionist poet and lecturer., based mostly in Philadelphia. During the Civil War, Harper married and raised a family in Ohio. After the war, she became involved in a number of reform movements and continued her career as a writer. In May 1866, Harper spoke at the National Woman’s Rights Convention in New York, the eleventh in a series of national woman’s rights gatherings which had been first launched in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1850. This was the movement primarily organized and presided over by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. Harper’s speech electrified the convention, calling out as it did both sexism and racism and contributing to the creation of the American Equal Rights Association (AERA) a few weeks later. The AERA helped lead several suffrage fights in places like Kansas in 1867 before it disbanded over disagreements among the reformers about whether they needed to prioritize the struggles ex-slaves about the general call for more women’s rights. “We are all bound up together,” Harper had wisely observed in 1866, but the spirit of that admonition proved difficult to sustain.
SOURCE FORMAT: Public speech
TEXT: Lazarus, “The New Colossus” (1883)
- The poem takes a Petrarchan sonnet form, which means it has two divisions: eight lines or octave followed by six lines or sestet with a change in rhyme scheme and turn in thought or volta between them
- Hirsch also emphasizes the importance of meter to Lazarus –how the poem rejects iambic pentameter and instead “echoes” traditional Greek epic meter (dactylic hexameter) (p. 73)