1. Imagine that Puritan-era Anne Bradstreet and Enlightenment-era Judith Sargent Murray read and

critique one another’s poems. What would each say about the other’s poem, both the favorable and the

unfavorable?

2. You could say that both Edgar Allan Poe’s story “Ligeia” and his poem “Annabel Lee” are about ‘mad

love,’ or what the French call ‘l’amour fou.’ (The French were greater admirers of Poe than the

Americans, for many years.) My question is, What does the supernatural have to do with the special quality

of love in these two pieces? That is, how is the presence and the agency of the supernatural (in the story,

whatever it is that causes
Ligeia’s return; in the poem, those angels…)—how is this supernatural element used to justify the ‘crazed’

or obsessive nature of these romantic relationships?

3. In a letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman said that one of the greatest lies of modern culture

was the way it repressed all talk about the human body and especially about sex—or, when it did talk

about sex, talked of it only as “nastiness.” He said such a culture would remain “cowardly and rotten,” so

long as it refused to “publicly accept, and publicly name, with specific words, the things on which all

existence, all souls, all realization, all decency, all health, all that is worth being here for, all of woman and

of man, all beauty, all purity, all sweetness, all friendship, all strength, all life, all immortality, depend” (p

1094).
How do the two sections assigned above from “Song of Myself” (#s 11 and 24) help to advance Whitman’s
convictions about the body and sex? That’s reading them with the grain. But also read them against: What
ideas about gender—in relation to sex, desire, the particular bodies of men and women (as opposed to

simply
The Body)—do these two sections of Whitman’s poem reveal?

4. Treat the four poems by Emily Dickinson as if they were chapters in the romantic life of their speaker.

Don’t go searching for biographical details about Dickinson herself; rather, pretend that these four poems

are all we have from this one “I,” this speaker, and then tell that speaker’s love story. What can you tell,

from the poems
alone, about this speaker’s experience of love? And (now going against the grain) what about gender?

Can you even say whether the speaker is male or female—or whether the “you,” the “thee,” is male or

female?
Read the following texts, paying special attention in each to the ways that gender and the relations

between the sexes are figured, and also to each author’s underlying (not necessarily explicit) ideas about

gender and the sexes, and about love, sex, and marriage:
Anne Bradstreet, “A Letter to her Husband, Absent upon Public Employment,” 124-125
Judith Sargent Murray, 406-407, “On the Equality of the Sexes,” 408-409 (just the poem, not the rest!)
Edgar Allan Poe, “Annabel Lee,” 738-739
Poe, “Ligeia,” 739-749
Walt Whitman [Section 11 from “Song of Myself”], “Twenty-eight young men bathe by the shore,” 1095
Whitman [Section 24 from “Song of Myself”], “Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son,” 1105-1107
Emily Dickinson, “Wild nights – Wild nights!,” 1254
Dickinson, “I never lost as much but twice,” 1250
Dickinson, “I cannot live with you,” 1266-1267
Dickinson, “My life closed twice before it’s close,” 1271

Sample Solution