Life in the Iron Mills

For Monday, read Rebecca Harding Davis's Life in the Iron-Mills (1861). The full text is available here. But, for Monday, you only have to read the excerpted text that I've published online here. (Remember: all of our online texts can be accessed via the link to our syllabus in the upper right-hand corner of the motherblog.)

"Who goes there! hankering, gross, mystical, nude? "

For Wed., you'll want to read Whitman's "Song of Myself." Read up to the end of page 33 in the online version on the syllabus. That is, up until the lines: "The suicide sprawls on the bloody floor of the bedroom. /It is so . . . . I witnessed the corpse . . . . there the pistol had fallen."

If we're going to use Whitman to establish certain perennial themes in 19th-century American literature, let's pay attention to several motifs he establishes right away in "Song of Myself," including: nature, the body, the self, and most importantly, the relationship between poet and reader. Enjoy!

Welcome to American Lit, 1865 - 1914

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