Final Review: The final will be structured much like the midterm, with a combination of quote identification, definitions, and short answers. The material covered will include Ragtime, The Scarlet Letter, “Song of Myself,” and all the sonnets. I will choose the quotes from the examples listed below.
1. There was a lot of sexual fainting. There were no Negroes. There were no immigrants.
2. We must not talk in the market-place of what happens to us in the forest.
3. There sits among us this evening one of the most brilliant women in America, a woman forced by this capitalist society to find her genius in the exercise of her sexual attraction…
4. Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”/ Nothing beside remains. Round the decay/ Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare /The lone and level sands stretch far away.
5. She had wandered, without rule or guidance, in a moral wilderness… her intellect and heart had their home, as it were, in desert places…For years past she had looked from this estranged point of view at human institutions, and whatever priests or legislators had established; criticizing all with hardly more reverence than the Indian would feel for the clerical band… The tendency of her fate and fortunes had been to set her free. … Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers—stern and wild ones—and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.
6. The old man’s narrative would often drift from English to Latin without his being aware of it, as if he were reading to one of his classes of forty years before, so that it appeared nothing was immune to the principle of volatility, not even language.
7. When, just as the soil tarnishes with weed,/The sturdy seedling with arched body comes/ Shouldering its way and shedding the earth crumbs.
8. He was disturbed by his nostalgia. He’d always thought of himself as progressive. He believed in the perfectibility of the republic. He thought, for instance, there was no reason the Negro could not with proper guidance carry every burden of human achievement.
9. But, on one side of the portal, and rooted almost at the threshold, was a wild rose-bush, covered, in this month of June, with its delicate gems, which might be imagined to offer their fragrance and fragile beauty to the prisoner as he went in, and to the condemned criminal as he came forth to his doom, in token that the deep heart of Nature could pity and be kind to him.
10. I cared not, at this period, for books; they were apart from
me. Nature—except it were human nature—the nature that is developed
in earth and sky, was, in one sense, hidden from me; and all the imaginative
delight, wherewith it had been spiritualized, passed away out of my mind.
A gift, a faculty, if it had not departed, was suspended and inanimate
within me.
11. The oppressor is wealth, my friends. Wealth is the
oppressor. …[to learn that] he needed only to suffer.
12. I have no chair, no church, no philosophy,/I lead no man to a dinner-table,
library, exchange/But each man and woman of you I lead upon a knoll/My
left hand hooking you around the waist,/My right hand pointing to landscapes
of continents and the public road/ Not I, not any one else can travel that
road for you/You must travel it for yourself
13. Such was the sympathy of Nature—that wild, heathen Nature
of the forest, never subjugated by human law, nor illumined by higher truth—with
the bliss of these two spirits! Love, whether newly born or aroused
from deathlike slumber, must always create a sunshine, filling the heart
so full of radiance, that it overflows upon the outward world.
14. A bunch of children who were pals, white black, fat thin, rich poor,
all kinds, mischievous little urchins who would have funny adventures in
their own neighborhood, a society of ragamuffins like all of us, a gang,
getting into trouble and getting out again.
15. I celebrate myself, and sing myself/And what I assume you
shall assume/For every atom belonging to me as good as belongs to you.
16. It is a curious subject of observation and inquiry, whether hatred and love be not the same thing at bottom. Each in its utmost development, supposes a high degree of intimacy and heart-knowledge; each renders one individual dependent for the food of his affections and spiritual life upon another; each leaves the passionate lover, or the no less passionate hater, forlorn and desolate by the withdrawal of his object.
17. Moonlight, in a familiar room… is a medium most suitable for a romance-writer to get acquainted with his illusive guests. … Thus, therefore, the floor of our familiar room has become a neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet and each imbue itself with the nature of the other.
18. What brought the kindred spider to that height/Then steered the white moth hither in the night?/ What but design of darkness to appall?—/If design govern in a thing so small.
19. It had been intended, there could be no doubt, as an ornamental article of dress, but how it was to be worn, or what rank, honor, and dignity, in by-past times, were signified by it, was a riddle which … I saw little hope of solving.
20. She has the freedom of a broken law.
21. She silently resented the intrusion, not as in the old days but
with some awareness of her own, some sort of expectation on the skin that
was only pounded from her.
22. When Aunt is dead, her terrified hands will lie /Still ringed with ordeals she was mastered by. /The tigers in the panel that she made /Will go on prancing, proud and unafraid.
23. Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged/Missing me one place search another/I stop somewhere waiting for you.
24. The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem… Here at last is something in the doings of man that corresponds with the broadcast doings of day and night.
25. I am the teacher of athletes/He that by me spreads a wider breast than my own proves the width of my own/He most honors my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher/The boy I love, the same becomes a man not through derived power, but in his own right/Wicked rather than virtuous out of conformity or fear…
26. Indeed the same dark question often rose into her mind, with reference ot the whole race of womanhood. Was existence worth accepting, even to the happiest among them? As concerned her own individual existence, she had long ago decided in the negative and dismissed the poinht as it settled…She discerns, it may be, such a hopeless task before her. As a first step, the whole system of society is to be torn down and built up anew. Then the very nature of the opposite sex, or its long hereditary habit, which has become like nature, is to be essentially modified, before woman can be allowed to assume what seems like a fair and suitable position.
Terms:
epic poetry
lyric poetry
interpretive community
romance
allegory
stanza
sonnet