Dickinson Vs Whitman

Whitman's poetic soul, like the spider, stands isolated at the center of all things. If it is to take on meaning, it must... come to a realization of itself... The poet then, like the spider is complete in himself-a seer and a "kosmos" - constantly "musing, venturing, throwing, seeking" in an effort to create his own order by forming a union with the whole (Eckley 20).

Death; termination of vital existence; passing away of the physical state. Dying comes along with a pool of emotions that writers have many times tried to explain. Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman were two pioneer poets from the Romantic Era, that introduced new, freer styles of writing to modern poetry at the time. Both Whitman and Dickinson have similar ideas in their writing, but each has a unique touch of expression in their works. Both poets have portrayed death in their poetry as a relief, a salvation, or escape to a better place- another life. They have formulated death as a positive yet ambiguous state. In Dickinson's "Narrow Fellow in the Grass" and Whitman's "Wound-Dresser", there exists a link

life; 1862 was when she wrote most of her poetry. She was writing about one

Lastly, the poet also uses hyperbole to express his poem with lines such as “dawn leaping,” “sun swells,” and “light rushing to darkness,” (Bradley, 1986, p. 749). The poet continues to use this imagery to stimulate the reader’s imagination. The poet keeps the mysterious flow moving and finally ending making the reader ask if he makes a sound that can be heard from a great distance yet not knowing for sure.

In Whitman’s “A Noiseless Patient Spider,” a desolate spider that vainly attempts to start a web represents loneliness. When the narrator shifts from speaking about the spider making its web to a human soul attempting to find its place in the world, he depicts the soul stranded and lying among “measureless oceans of space” (Arp 727). The spider is having trouble attaching its first fiber to a branch on the tree in order to start its web. The soul is having trouble finding a niche in the world in order to feel a sense of belonging. The isolation of the spider describes how despairing and desolate a person may feel when there are so

The lives of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson have many similarities and differences. Here, we will focus on the similarities in their lives in order to bring to attention a correlation between Whitman's poem I Saw in Louisiana a Live-oak Growing and Dickinson's poem # 1510. Both poets wrote during the time of Romanticism, even though Whitman was Dickinson's senior by some eleven years. This however did not influence the way the writing styles of many of their poems coincided.

The furniture in the apartment constantly moves across the screen, creating the illusion of the viewer spinning and linking to the idea that the speaker’s mind is spinning as well (Janis). As the speaker questions the placement of the “sink,… door,… refrigerator,… window,… couch,… desk,…” and “bed,” the illustrations of these furniture pieces bring the poem to life. The reader finds orientation only through the single capital letter and punctuation mark that mark the beginning and end (Janis). Otherwise, the reader navigates chunks of text in any order, mimicking the confusion that the speaker shows.

In “A Noiseless, Patient Spider,” Walt Whitman suggests that the Spider’s actions of desperation cause the narrator to question his own security of survival and uncertainty within his soul. In Stanza 1, the spider is isolated on a rock surrounded by water. As the narrator carefully observes the spider, he sees the spider continuously launching its filaments “tirelessly” in its “vast” surroundings. Filaments from the spider are silk that spiders strand together to assemble their webs. These thin filaments are called gossamer, and they make up their webs. The narrator knows “where [his] soul stands”, but is lacking the filaments that show his future.

The poem I have decided to read and analyze is “The spider and the Fly” by Mary Howitt. The poem tells a story of a cunning spider that ties to deceive a silly fly through flattery. Howitt uses many literary devices such as rhyme similes, repetition, alliteration, personification and, Assonance to tell the story of the spider and the fly. The first four stanzas follow the same rhyme scheme, i.e. AABBCC. The fourth and fifth stanza follows AABBCCDD. The last stanza has a scheme of AABB.

To support that idea, Whitman states in the second line of the first stanza “A noiseless patient spider,I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated” to establish the idea of humans isolated from his presence. In addition, Whitman also makes notice of humans making an effort to develop a connection when he wires in the fourth line “It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself, Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.” Finally Whitman closes out the poem by writing

This poem is a prototype for Whitman’s pre-war writing style. He published his long poems with their innovative catalogue-style, a frequent stylistic use of enumeration and anaphora.

In under 20 lines, Walt Whitman managed to give a broad detail of his views on the world in his poem “ A Noiseless Patient Spider”. He started by talking about his observation of a tiny spider that moves to a outtake on the world. The spider seems to be having difficulty creating its web as it constantly misses the support to stick to something to form a beautiful tricket of design known as a spiders web. Whitman uses the spiders constant missing as a metaphor about how us as humans may try to connect and hope to catch onto something or someone that will provide a steady web. As in the last stanza, Whitman said how his soul needed to catch a gossamer or web and catch and hold onto the connection. He soul is exhausted of being detached and

Whitman was loud, bold, and often boastful person and his personality showed in his poetry. Whitman’s style is different from any other poets, which is one reason for his immense success. Whitman’s introduction of free verse writing to the poetry world nullified the typical rules that confine many romantics, like himself, to the very restrictions that they are trying to escape. His use of cadence allowed him to create a very organic and flowing style of writing, allowing him to continue with his rambling lines of thought and observation. He utilizes this cadence technique to fully express his opinions and capture his observations.

Imagery is a way through which the author can conjure images in readers’ minds. Cummings uses few words in his poem to evoke strong images. In the line “when the world is mud-luscious (lines 2-3),”

Rachel Buxton states that the intertextuality of the poem goes in line with the concept that reading a literary work is entering into a variety of texts (37). This notion is highlighted by Julia Kristeva’s assertion that “in the space of a given text, several utterances, taken from other texts, intersect and neutralize one another” (36) and in Roland Barthes’ reminder that “the word ‘text’ originally meant ‘a tissue, a woven fabric’” (159) and that the “idea of the text, and thus of intertextuality, depends …on this figure of the web, the weave, the garment (text) woven from the threads of the ‘already written’ and the ‘already read’”(G. Allen 6).