William Cullen Bryant

Type of Poet

Major Works

What did his quote have to do with?

Early romantic, NOT a Fireside Poet
           Thanatopsis, The Murdered Traveler
          "Truth, crushed to earth, shall rise again."

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

What type of poet?

What did his quote have to do with?

Major Works

Background Information

Fireside Poet

"We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done."

"The Cross of Snow," "Tide Rises, Tide Falls," "Psalm of Life"

-grew up in Maine

-at age 15 he entered Bowdoin College

-started school at age 3

-classmate of Nathaniel Hawthorne

-1st wife died of birth (miscarriage)

-2nd wife died of house fire

-beard covers up scars

-1st American writer to be honored with a bust in Poet's Corner of London's Westminister Abbey

Oliver Wendell Holmes

What type of poet?

What does his quote have to do with?

Major Works

Background Information

Fireside Poet

"Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions."

"Old Ironsides," "The Chambered Nautilus"

-dropped out of law school

-physician and poet

-literary star at age 21 when he wrote "Old Ironsides"

-friends with Nathaniel Hawthorne (same writers club- The Saturday Club)

Robert Greenlead Whittlier

What type of poet?

Background Information

Fireside Poet

-Quaker

-Abolitionist

James Lowell

What type of poet?

Background Information

Fireside Poet

-editor of The Atlantic Monthly

-tried to use poetry for social reform

Longfellow

Holmes

Whittlier

Lowell

What is this?

a rhymed fourteen-line poem, usually written in iambic pentameter

Elizabethan or Shakespearean

3 4 line groups, called quatrains, followed by 2 final rhyming lines, called a couplet

Petrarchan or Italian

divided into 2 groups

1. octave- the first 8 lines

2. sestet- last 6 lines

**CROSS OF SNOW IS AN EXAMPLE**

Mans life

VS

Nature