Licensure Examination for Teachers (LET) Review

American Literature
Colonial Period

 William Bradford – wrote

Of Plymouth Plantation
 Captain John Smith –
Pocahontas episode;
established the first
English settlement in the
New World
Colonial Period

 Anne Bradstreet –
wrote The Tenth
Muse lately
Sprung Up in
America
Colonial Period

 Jonathan Edwards – wrote the

powerful sermon “Sinners in the
Hands of an Angry God”
"There is nothing that
keeps wicked men at any
one moment out of hell,
but the mere pleasure of
God."
Period of Enlightenment

 Benjamin Franklin
 Thomas Paine
 Philip Freneau
 Washington Irving
 James Fennimore
Cooper
 Phyllis Wheatley
Period of Enlightenment

 Benjamin Franklin
– Wrote the Autobiography, a self-help
book written to share pieces of advice to
his son
– An important figure in the 1787
Convention which drafted the US
Constitution
– Was President of the Anti-slavery
Association
Period of Enlightenment

 Thomas Paine – wrote the pamphlet

The Common Sense in which he
wrote, “The cause of America is in
great measure the cause of all
mankind.”
Period of Enlightenment

 Philip Freneau – the

poet of the
American
Revolution
THE WILD HONEYSUCKLE
by: Philip Freneau (1752-1832)
AIR flower, that dost so comely grow,
Hid in this silent, dull retreat,
Untouched thy honied blossoms blow,
Unseen thy little branches greet:
No roving foot shall crush thee here,
No busy hand provoke a tear.

By Nature’s self in white arrayed,

She bade thee shun the vulgar eye,
And planted here the guardian shade,
And sent soft waters murmuring by;
Thus quietly thy summer goes,
Thy days declining to repose.
Smit with those charms, that must decay,
I grieve to see your future doom;
They died--nor were those flowers more gay,
The flowers that did in Eden bloom;
Unpitying frosts and Autumn’s power
Shall leave no vestige of this flower.

From morning suns and evening dews

At first thy little being came;
If nothing once, you nothing lose,
For when you die you are the same;
The space between is but an hour,
The frail duration of flower.
Period of Enlightenment

Washington Irving
– wrote Legend of
the Sleepy Hollow
and Rip Van Winkle
Period of Enlightenment

James Fennimore
Cooper – wrote The
Leatherstocking
Tales that feature
the life of
frontiersman Natty
Bumpo. His
masterpiece is the
Last of the Mohicans
Period of Enlightenment

 Phyllis Wheatley
was the second
published African
American poet
whose writings
helped create the
genre of African
American literature
The Romantic Period (Poets)

 Ralph Waldo Emerson

 Henry David Thoreau
 Walt Whitman
 Emily Dickinson
 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
 Oliver Wendell Holmes
 PSALM OF LIFE
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

TELL me not, in mournful numbers,

Life is but an empty dream ! —
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.
Life is real ! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal ;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.
Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
Is our destined end or way ;
But to act, that each to-morrow
Find us farther than to-day.
 PSALM OF LIFE
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Art is long, and Time is fleeting,

And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.
In the world's broad field of battle,
In the bivouac of Life,
Be not like dumb, driven cattle !
Be a hero in the strife !
Trust no Future, howe'er pleasant !
Let the dead Past bury its dead !
Act,— act in the living Present !
Heart within, and God o'erhead !
 PSALM OF LIFE
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Lives of great men all remind us

We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time ;
Footprints, that perhaps another,
Sailing o'er life's solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.
Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate ;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.
Henry David Thoreau

Walden Pond
 WHEN I HEARD THE LEARN’D
ASTRONOMER
Walt Whitman

WHEN I heard the learn’d astronomer;

When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in
columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and
measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much
applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.
Because I Could Not Stop for Death
Emily Dickinson

BECAUSE I could not stop for Death,

He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.
We slowly drove, he knew no haste,
And I had put away
My labor, and my leisure too,
For his civility.
We passed the school where children played
At wrestling in a ring;
We passed the fields of gazing grain,
We passed the setting sun.
Because I Could Not Stop for Death

We paused before a house that seemed

A swelling of the ground;
The roof was scarcely visible,
The cornice but a mound.

Since then ’t is centuries; but each

Feels shorter than the day
I first surmised the horses’ heads
Were toward eternity.
The Romantic Period
(Fiction writers)
 Nathaniel Hawthorne – Scarlet Letter
 Herman Melville – Moby Dick
 Edgar Allan Poe – Cask of Amontillado
 Harrier Beecher Stowe – Uncle Tom’s
Cabin
Nathaniel Hawthorne

Scarlet Letter
 THE RAVEN
Edgar Allan Poe

Deep into the darkness peering, long I

stood there, wondering, fearing
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortals
ever dared to dream before;
But the silence was unbroken, and the
stillness gave no token,
And the only word there spoken was the
whispered word,
Lenore, This I whispered, and an echo
murmured back the word,
"Lenore!" Merely this, and nothing more.
Identify the poem in
which the line is taken.
Quoth the raven “nevermore.”

A. Ulalume Ballad
B. The Sleeper
C. Lenore
D. The Raven
Realism

 Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)

 Bret Harte
 Henry James
 Edith Wharton
 Stephen Crane
 Jack London
Realism

 Theodore Dreiser
 Willa Cather
 Carl Sandburg
 Edwin Arlington Robinson
 Langston Hughes
 THE GRASS
Carl Sandburg
Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.
Shovel them under and let me work -
I am the grass; I cover all.
And pile them high at Gettysburg
And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.
Shovel them under and let me work.
Two years, ten years, and passengers
ask the conductor:
What place is this?
Where are we now?
I am the grass.
Let me work.
American Realism

 F. Scott Fitzgerald
 Ernest Hemingway
 William Faulkner
 Sinclair Lewis
 John Steinbeck
 Sylvia Plath
 Richard Wright
 Zora Neale Hurston
Modernist Poets

 Ezra Pound
 T.S. Eliot
 Robert Frost
 Wallace Stevens
 William Carlos Williams
 e.e. cummmings
 MENDING WALL
Robert Frost

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
continued…
 MENDING WALL
Robert Frost

And on a day we meet to walk the line

And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, 'Good fences make good
neighbors'.
 MENDING WALL
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.' I could say 'Elves' to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me~
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good
neighbors."
First black woman to receive the
Nobel Prize in 1993

"who in novels
characterized by
visionary force and
poetic import,
gives life to an
essential aspect of
American reality"
 ARS POETICA
Archibald MacLeish

A poem should be palpable and mute

As a globed fruit,

Dumb
As old medallions to the thumb,

Silent as the sleeve-worn stone

Of casement ledges where the moss has grown--

A poem should be wordless

As the flight of birds.
 ARS POETICA
Archibald MacLeish

A poem should be motionless in time

As the moon climbs,
Leaving, as the moon releases
Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,
Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,
Memory by memory the mind–
A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs.
 ARS POETICA
Archibald MacLeish

A poem should be equal to:

Not true.
For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf.
For love
The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea—
A poem should not mean
But be.