My two most recent posts have focused on a poem from the early part of the 1800s, “The American Flag,” by Joseph Rodman Drake. The grandiloquent language, the rigid structure, the customary elements and the predictable rhyme scheme of the poem are all very typical for a work from that time, though today the poem and the poet are long forgotten (except, perhaps, for occasional performances of Antonin Dvorak’s cantata based on the work).
Compare Drake’s poem, though, to Walt Whitman’s “Song of the Banner at Daybreak,” another work about the American flag, this one written just after the start of the Civil War in 1861, though it was not published until 1865.
The poem is lengthy, so rather than posted as a pic below, clink on this link to read the entire work HERE.
“Song of the Banner at Daybreak” was published in a collection of Whitman’s poetry entitled “Drum-Taps,” poems which chronicle the Civil War through the poet’s experiences as a volunteer nurse in military hospitals. The works move from initial feelings of patriotic fervor to the grim realities of war, loss, and healing.
But compare the structures and language of the two works, written just forty-five years apart, Drake’s in 1816 and Whitman’s in 1861. Then try this: Compare Drake’s poem to another similarly battle-themed poem by Philip Freneau, “On the Memorable Victory,” written 35 years earlier.
The opening stanzas are below; the complete poem is HERE.
The poem is lengthy, so rather than posted as a pic below, clink on this link to read the entire work HERE.
“Song of the Banner at Daybreak” was published in a collection of Whitman’s poetry entitled “Drum-Taps,” poems which chronicle the Civil War through the poet’s experiences as a volunteer nurse in military hospitals. The works move from initial feelings of patriotic fervor to the grim realities of war, loss, and healing.
But compare the structures and language of the two works, written just forty-five years apart, Drake’s in 1816 and Whitman’s in 1861. Then try this: Compare Drake’s poem to another similarly battle-themed poem by Philip Freneau, “On the Memorable Victory,” written 35 years earlier.
The opening stanzas are below; the complete poem is HERE.
I think you’ll find little difference in the style and structure between Freneau’s poem of 1771 to Drake’s in 1816, but wow – what a difference between Drake’s poem of 1816 to Whitman’s in 1861.
Now, fast-forward a little more than forty-five years, to 1915, and check out T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” (with that notable line, “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons”), HERE – and by the way, “The Red Wheelbarrow” was written just eight years later.
Now, fast-forward a little more than forty-five years, to 1915, and check out T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” (with that notable line, “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons”), HERE – and by the way, “The Red Wheelbarrow” was written just eight years later.
 | I could keep going, jumping thirty or forty years at a stretch to compare styles and movements of poetry, but consider this – back in the 1860s, Emily Dickinson sat alone in her room writing about the blue, uncertain, stumbling buzz of a fly and the funeral in the brain of a corpse and dreary public frogs with their admiring bogs – and I cannot tell you how grateful I am that her works were published, how beholden I am to her keen and observant mind, and how I marvel at how her language, thoughts, and style influenced the soul of poetry. |
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