Post- world War II, Victorian Female, and Romantic Period Female Literature Comparison of Language

Emily Dickinson (1830–1886)

Brilliant nineteenth-century American poet Emily Dickinson was a phenom, writing almost 1,800 poems, of which only ten were published while she was alive. Her lyrical, rhythmic poems are bold and unconventional, employing iambic trimeter and tetrameter and punctuated by dashes. The subject matter spanned everything from nature to metaphysics, and her work was at turns imaginative and clever (“Because I could not stop for Death”), haunted and mocking (“I’m Nobody! Who are you?”), or impassioned and longing (“Wild nights – Wild nights!”). 
She’s now regarded as one of two most important American poets of the nineteenth century, alongside Walt Whitman. 

Amanda Gorman (1998–)

Former first-ever National Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman examines issues of racism, national unity, diversity, feminism, and the future in her optimistic, hopeful poems. Gorman read the poem heard ’round the world at the inauguration of President Biden: “The Hill We Climb.” Gorman followed her historic recitation—as the youngest poet in inauguration history—with a performance of her new original poem “Chorus of the Captains” at Super Bowl LV in 2021. She became the first poet to perform at the Super Bowl. 
Gorman, born in Los Angeles, has said she’s struggled with speech articulation and was diagnosed with an auditory processing disorder that challenged her to become a stronger reader and writer. She attended Harvard College and studied sociology. In 2015, her first book of poems, The One for Whom Food Is Not Enough, was published. A collection called The Hill We Climb And Other Poems and a picture book featuring Gorman’s poems titled Change Sings will both be published in September 2021, sure to inspire youth poets to pick up their pens.

bell hooks (1952–)

Activist, professor, poet, and theorist bell hooks is renowned for her writing on the theory of intersectionality, particularly in regard to race, gender, and capitalism. Born Gloria Jean Watkins and writing under a pen name inspired by her grandmother, hooks hones in on issues facing Black women in Black Looks: Race and Representation and Ain’t I a Woman?: Black Women and Feminism. 
Throughout her work, hooks critiques capitalist systems for reinforcing sexism, misogyny, and racism. There’s a staggering breadth to hooks’s creative output—from her expounding on engaged pedagogy (in Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom) to media theory (in Reel to Real: Race, class and sex at the movies), to poetry books and memoirs. In 2014, the legendary thinker helped found Berea College’s The bell hooks Institute in her native Kentucky in order to protect the legacy of Black female writers and provide an accessible, class-inclusive community discussion space.