Comparing Rural Life in Sleepy Hallow, and Letters from an American Farmer - Essay Example

Download file to see previous pages Irving and Crevecoeur both portrayed a superficial rural life.
The restful, drowsy, dreamy effects of Sleepy Hallow mark a romantic idealization of nature.
The tranquility of Sleepy hollow is bestowed by natural beauty while Crevecoeur’s idealization expresses the artificial rural bliss.
Irving describes Sleepy Hallow as a place living peacefully in agrarian seclusion (Steiner, 1996) while Crevecoeur’s ideology of American rural life depends on economical, political, and agricultural pursuits (American Literature  Lectures, Part II, Shaping of the National Ideas, n.d.).
1862 was the year of the greatest stress for Emily Dickinson's life as distance and danger (of war) were threatening Emily's friends - Samuel Bowles, Charles Wadsworth, and T.W. Higginson. During this great emotional intensity, she wrote more than 300 poems. Although her resplendent poetry portraits all aspects of human life yet the major subjects of this eon were love, death, nature, and God.
Love: Though Emily Dickinson led a self-imposed seclusion life yet she had “treated the great lyric theme of love with entire candor and sincerity” (Whicher, n.d.).
The poems “My Life closed twice before its close”, “I cannot live with you”, “Wild nights! Wild nights!” and “I had no time to Hate” clearly reflect the gamut of her love from denunciation to the profession and sexual zeal and ecstasy.
Death: Since Dickenson was convinced by Puritan belief, so death seems to be the supreme touchstone for her to proclaim the ultimate truth and true nature of God. “Death is personified in many guises in her poems, ranging from a suitor to a tyrant” (Emily Dickenson. An Overview, n.d.). The enigma of her ambivalent nature also influenced the death theme. On one side death is an awful thing while on another side it is a welcome relief and a blessed way to heaven. Her poems “I heard a fly buzz when I died”, “Because I could not stop for Death”, “Safe in their alabaster chambers” and “I died for beauty but was scarce” are persuasive scrutiny about the ruthless callous nature of death and helplessness of human being against death.
Nature: Nature has always remained the source of joy, allure, and beauty for poetry. Emily Dickenson was also inspired by mother nature. She summed all her lyrics as “the simple news that nature told” (Reuben, 2006). The character of a robin, the bee, the butterfly, and the rats symbolize her love for nature as a creator.
God: Being rooted and raised in Puritanical theological orientation Emily Dickenson always remained anxious in defining the relationship between God and human beings. “She was taught all the premises of Calvinistic dogma - but she reacted strenuously against two of them: infant damnation and God’s sovereign election of His own” (Reuben, 2006). Her poems open the vistas of true human responses towards God's will from friendliness to annoyance and acrimony.
The major characteristic of Bryant and Longfellow’s poetry was “Romanticism”. This predominance movement of the 18th and 19th centuries against neoclassicism was associated with imagination and boundlessness as truly defined by Vector Hugo as the “liberalism in literature” (Holman, n.d.). ...Download file to see next pages Read More