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Dickinson And Walt Whitman Comparison

Decent Essays

Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman are very similar, yet very different in the ways they write their poetry. Dickinson is more accustomed to a quiet lifestyle in Amherst Massachusetts whereas Whitman comes from a more exciting background with living in the city and traveling from place to place. Although they are differ in the ways they grew up they both tend to focus on nature in their poems. Walt Whitman’s poetry is normally very long and wordy. He has more of a conversational style rather than traditional. He also writes in free verse whereas Emily Dickinson poems can be described more as lyrical, her poems are also much shorter than Whitman’s. Dickinson doesn’t like to drag her poems out she likes to be quick and right to the point. …show more content…

Dickinson uses rhyme a lot in her poems. For example in Dickinson’s poem “712” she writes “He kindly stopped for me/ The Carriage held but just Ourselves/ And Immortality” (lines 2-4) Here she used an abcb rhyme scheme as one of her many poetic devices used in this poem. She also uses figurative language and personification to help get her point’s a crossed. Whitman, on the other hand, rarely ever uses a rhyme scheme. He uses imagery to help create a mental picture in the reader’s minds and uses pathos to get the readers emotionally involves in his poems. In Whitman’s poem, “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer,” he uses imagery to show the mood and setting by saying, “In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, /Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars” (lines 7&8). Although Dickinson does us imagery from time-to-time she doesn’t use it nearly as often as

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