11 Studying Groups of Poems

Chapter Outline

1. Walt Whitman: Poems on Lincoln
   1. Hush’d Be the Camps To-day
   2. O Captain! My Captain!
   3. When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d
   4. This Dust Was Once the Man
2. Emily Dickinson: Poems on Time
   1. 1
      1. I like to see it lap the Miles –
   2. 2
      1. Because I could not stop for Death –
   3. 3
      1. The Heart asks Pleasure – first –
   4. 4
      1. I felt a Cleaving in my Mind
   5. 5
      1. The first Day’s Night had come –
   6. 6
      1. After great pain, a formal feeling comes
   7. 7
      1. There’s a certain Slant of light
   8. 8
      1. Pain – expands the Time
3. Writing Your Paper

Sometimes you will want to assemble a group of poems by a single author in order to write in depth about that author’s practice. The best way to do this is to find a group of poems about a single theme or a group of poems concerning a single problem. To illustrate this process, we reprint, first, four poems written by Walt Whitman (1819–1892) about Abraham Lincoln after Lincoln was assassinated, with some information found in books about the assassination; and second, a number of poems by Emily Dickinson that consider the problem of how we mark off and describe events as they take place in time.