During our first sessions, we studied how Walt Whitman influenced the style and diction of Emily Dickinson. I further placed Emily Dickinson in the historic context of America's Great Awakening , an evangelical type movement, and we examined the influence of religion on Dickinson's poetry, specifically her amorphous view on immortality and the possibility of an afterlife. Nina did well in identifying the personification of death in "I could not stop for Death" and the point of view of the speaker -who is deceased. Likewise, Nina did well in recognizing Dickinson's suggestion in other poems that death is a mundane event with no theological significance. We next studied Housman's famous poem "To an Athlete Dying Young" and had an engaging discussion on what happens to sports and entertainment celebrities once their lifespan far exceeds the lives of their reputation and they are no longer treated as American royalty. During our next(3rd) session, we studied Yeats and his pessimistic view of history and the import of the famous phrase"slouching toward Bethlehem" from the poem"Second Coming." We noted the irony in the poem's title which anticipates a second coming of Christ ,not world chaos. We then worked on edits and rewriting Nina's essay on "Rime of the Ancient Mariner."