Answers for Grades K-3:
1)
Longfellow’s father wanted him to be a lawyer, but instead, he became a
professor, a linguist, a librarian, and a poet.
2) Many scholars consider Henry David Thoreau to be the father of the American conservation and preservation movements because as he got older, his attentions turned more towards the observing and recording of natural history in Concord.
3) False: Emily seldom went out after she turned eighteen, staying secluded in her father’s house and only taking several trips during her lifetime.
4) Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote “The Song of Haiwatha,” Robert Frost wrote “The Road Not Taken,” and Carl Sandburg wrote “Fog.”
5)
Robert Frost’s life ambition was to write “a few poems it will be hard to get
rid of.”
6) His legal name was David Henry Thoreau. He unilaterally changed it after graduating from Harvard College. Not out of character, he never bothered to petition the state legislature to have his name legally and officially changed.
7)
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was three years old when he started going to school.
8)
Emily Dickinson wrote 1,775 poems. Only a handful was published during her
lifetime.
9)
False: At the beginning of the 19th century, America was a stumbling
babe as far as a culture of its own was concerned. Literature, art, and music
came mainly from Europe and especially from England. Nothing was considered
worthy of attention unless it came from Europe.
10) First, he had the gift of easy rhyme. Read or heard once or twice, his rhyme and meters cling to the mind long after the sense may be forgotten. Second, Longfellow wrote on obvious themes that appealed to all kinds of people.
Answers for Grades 4-8:
1)
Americans owe a great debt to Longfellow because he was among the first of
American writers to use native themes. He wrote about the American scene and
landscape, the American Indian (‘Song of
Hiawatha’), and American history and tradition (‘The Courtship of Miles Standish’, ‘Evangeline’).
2) At the beginning of the 19th century, America was a stumbling babe as far as a culture of its own was concerned. The people of America had spent their years and their energies in carving a habitation out of the wilderness and in fighting for independence. Literature, art, and music came mainly from Europe and especially from England.
3) Henry David Thoreau’s poet friend and mentor was Ralph Waldo Emerson.
4) Emerson’s first book, Nature, expressed his theories that the imagination of man is shaped by nature and helped spark an entirely new philosophical movement in New England.
5) The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841) is sometimes considered the first detective story.
6)
True
7) The publication of “Hiawatha” caused the greatest excitement because for the first time in American literature, Indian themes gained recognition as sources of imagination, power, and originality.
8) As a God-intoxicated poet, Walt Whitman desired to inaugurate a religion uniting all of humanity in bonds of friendship.
9)
It is in “Civil Disobedience” that Thoreau asks all of us to question our
actions and the actions of our state. “Civil
Disobedience” and Henry David Thoreau have had great impact on the lives of
some of America’s greatest leaders: President John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther
King, Jr., and Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglass.
10)
The “giants” were men of intellect and feeling who established the New Land as
a source of greatness. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson,
Henry
David Thoreau, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and William Prescott
were a few of the great minds and spirits among whom Longfellow took his place
as a singer and as a representative of America.
Answers for Highschool:
1) Poe demonstrated mastery of the forms he favored – highly musical poems and short prose narratives.
2) Although his verse forms are traditional, Robert Frost was a pioneer in the interplay of rhythm and meter and in the poetic use of the vocabulary and inflections of everyday speech.
3)
It was his brother’s death that prompted Thoreau to decide to go to Walden
Pond. He stayed there for two years, two months and two days.
4) Edgar Allen
Poe virtually created the detective story and perfected the psychological
thriller.
5) Eliot never compromised either with the public or indeed with language itself. He has followed his belief that poetry should aim at a representation of the complexities of modern civilization in language and that such representation necessarily leads to difficult poetry.
6) Just as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow served America in making the world conscious of its legend and tradition, so he opened to his students and to the American people the literary heritage of Europe. He created in them the new consciousness of the literature of Spain, France, Italy, and especially writings from the German, Nordic, and Icelandic cultures.
7) Carl Sandburg’s poetry expresses the hearty, earthy nature of America, finding both soft and harsh beauty amongst her people.
8) “The flowering of New England,” as Van Wyck Brooks terms the period from 1815 to 1865, took place in Longfellow’s day, and he made a great contribution to it.
9) Music was one of the major sources of Walt Whitman’s inspiration. Many of his four hundred poems contain musical terms, names of instruments, and names of composers.
10) Walden is Thoreau’s response to a multitude of questions he received as a result of living over two years in his small cabin in the woods at Walden Pond.