The voyage itself is a metaphor for search and discovery, the search for the ultimate tryth of experience. Eg, Ishmael goes to the sea to find a place where he can live a happy and ideal life. Gradually he comes to see the folly of Ahab seeking to conquer nature, and begins to feel the significance of love and value.
Moby Dick: Various scholars have interpreted it in various ways. To some, it’s a symbol of evil; to others, it is a symbol of goodness; to still others, it’s a symbol of both. It’s whiteness is a paradoxical color too, signifying death and corruption as well as purity, innocence and youth.
Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896)
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Best known American novel. The image of Tom is not one who fights and rebels. Indeed, Uncle Tom, the black man who suffers and endures has become a stereotype of black men’s humiliating passivity. Black writers since Stowe have to struggle with her creations.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Voices of the Night
Hiawatha
Evangeline 
The Courtship of Miles Standish
Famous for his lyrics and ballad. Most of his poems are simple and easily read so that even children can understand them.
Chapter Six
Whitman （1819—1892 ）
（the most outstanding poet in America in the 19thC）
Life story：
In 1819，born on Long Island，New York, brought up in working class family, attended public school for only 5 or 6 years. He tried at a variety of jobs and picked up a first hand knowledge of life and people in the new world: office boy, printer’s apprentice, schoolmaster, editor, and journalist. In 1855, the first edition of his Leaves of Grass （草叶集） came out. It was printed at his own expense and contained untitled 12 poems. The poems were attacked savagely for their free structure, sexuality and exotic and vulgar language. Therefore, it did not sell well.
During the Civil War, as male nurses were badly needed in military hospitals, he worked as a volunteer, a “wound dresser” in hospital, and wrote “Drum Taps” (桴鼓集) which has rich militant flavor. In the meantime, he continued to revise and expand his Leaves of Grass. It went through nine editions. In 1881, his single poem Leaves of Grass was published for the first time. It contained over 400 poems.
Themes of Leaves of Grass:
1. Extols the sacredness of the self, the self-reliant spirit and the joy of the common man.
e.g., In “Song of Myself ”（自我之歌）, “I” present everywhere, “I am deathless”, “I exist as I am”. “One world is aware, and that is myself”, “I celebrate myself and sing myself”, “I am large, I contain multitudes”.
2. Extols working people.
e.g., In “I hear America singing”（我听见美国在歌唱）, what the author hears are the songs of ordinary working people: shoemaker, ploughman, carpenter, and seaman. He praised highly of labor and laborers, saying their voice is the voice of America.
3. Extols nature.
He extols the beautiful land of his nation in many poems. In his writing, nature is fertile, is full of vigor and vitality. It reveals his spirit of patriotism.
4. Extols the principle of democracy and equality.
e.g., “Song of myself ”reveals a world of equality, without rank and hierarchy. The title of the poem “grass” also reveals his idea of democracy, because he dignified the most common  thing—grass. Ordinary as it is, it can grow in both narrow and spacious area, among the black as well as the white. “Grass” here stands for hundreds of thousands of ordinary working people.
   In a word, he was the poet of America and American democracy. He attempted to embrace the whole of America—the new bustling and progressive republic. In “There Was a Child Went Forth”, we see the spirit of an emerging America at its most aggressive and daring. The process of becoming is most clearly seen in the lines that suggest the daily growth of the child.
5. Extols beauty of death，and death is part of the cycle of birth，life，death and resurrection.
“Out of Cradle Endlessly Rocking”: On a bright day on the seashore, two birds were singing happily together. Then, one day, she-bird disappeared. When the he-bird called out on Land to return his mate, there was no response; there was only the waning moon, the whispering sea, the enveloping darkness that was night. Here, the sun, the day and land suggest life and the physical, while the moon, the night and the sea represent death and spiritual. On the seashore where the sea and land meet and merge, the cycle of nature in its rhythmical evolution, ends only to renew itself with death as the beginning of new life.
  “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”(当紫丁香最近在庭园开放的时候):deals with love —death theme. It was written as part of the memories of President Lincoln. In the poem, when the poet looks up, he sees the western fallen star, and then when he looks around, he spots the lilac bush blossoming in the dooryard. Here the star is associated with the thought of death, the lilac with a token of life for the dead. Death is not the end, but the beginning of life.
6. Exposes social corruption (e.g., in “Democratic Vistas民主远景”), shows sympathy for the black (e.g., in “Song of Myself”), shows concern for the Democratic Movement in the world (e.g., in “O Star of France”), maintains that material gains without personal morality are fruitless, individualism without brotherhood is suicide. The emphasis is clearly on brotherhood and social solidarity. This shows Whitman was a transitional figure from Romanticism and Transcendentalism to realism.
Style:
He broke with the convention and tradition of English verse.
1. used relatively simple words and avoided excess of figure of speech, appreciated the force of humble speech (colloquial, slang), praise such speech as growing out of human life.
2. broke from the traditional iambic pentameter, evolved his own type of free-verse.

Emily Dickinson（1830—1886）
（Precursor of the Imagist movement）

Life Story：
Born in 1830 into a Calvinist family. She was loved by her family and her cycle of intimate friends, so no one knew why she became a recluse later. She stayed almost all her life in the same house and the same yard except for a visit of a few weeks to Washington DC and a visit to Philadelphia in 1853. She had various peculiarities, like wearing only white, avoiding visitors. Besides her poetry, she had a passion for her garden. During her visit to Philadelphia, she had apparently fell in love with the eminent but married minister Wadsworth, whom she saw face to face only four times. She renounced him because he was married, and did not marry all her life.
During her lifetime, only seven of her poems had been published. After her death, relatives found hundreds of her poems. In 1950, Harvard University bought all her copyright. Five years later, the complete works of the poet were published, including three volumes of letter and 1775 poems.
Themes of her poems:
 Dickinson’s poetry illustrates her religious-ethical and political-social ideas. As Calvinist with its predestination and its pessimism pressured her and colored her work, her basic tone was tragic.
1. express a strong desire for religious certainty, God’s help and the good life.
In “At last to pray is left”(至少还可以做祈祷), she makes an earnest plea to Jesus, reveals a puzzled poet in search of love and help: “Say, Jesus Christ of Nazareth, hast thou no arm for me.” The loss of faith and the religious uncertainty troubled her repeatedly.
2.The largest poetry concerns death and immortality. For Dickinson, death leads to immortality. 
“Because I could not stop for death”(因为我没有静等死): She is in a carriage, first passes the School (childhood), then the Field (adult), then the Setting Sun (old age), but the horseback is toward Eternity.