“Dickinson and Whitman: differences and similarities”
Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson share more than contemporaneity in the bustling America of the XIX century. Both are celebrated as poets who have significantly transformed the American poetry from both style and content standpoints. While they are equally innovators and write about common subjects such as nature, death, and immortality, they speak from different perspectives. She produced a more intimate poetry - one that dealt with states of mind –, which can be attributed to some extent to her reclusive and quiet life. He, in contrast, had Nature as a way to connect with what he called “the Over Soul” and trusted its regenerative and instructional powers, dealing with this theme in a broader way when compared to Dickinson.
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In his poem A child said, What is the grass?, he portrays grass as representation of the life-death cycle. He responds to Emerson’s call celebrating nature as divine and a symbol of God, as the universe is full of life and meaning, calling the reader’s attention to the everyday minor miracles. He rejoices about a series of nature’s elements in his poetry, which can be extensively seen in Leaves of Grass.
Another focus of Whitman’s poetry in on the average people in opposition to individuals who exhorted power. His developed a concept of self that suited all individuals, in a way to join all Americans around a unified identity. Therefore, his poetry is perceived as communal, in opposition to Dickinson’s intimate voice.
From a formal perspective, Whitman is known as someone who have perfected the free verse while Dickinson preferred slant or partial rhyme schemes as well as irregular punctuation and capitalization. As far as length is concerned, Whitman wrote long and frequently intricate poems whereas Dickinson’s poems are rather shorter and more
Whitman does not leave much space for the readers’ own imagination while Dickinson chose her words so carefully so that the meaning of the poem comes across like she wants to. The last difference is the use of metric and rhyme in both poets’ work, there is no metric or rhyme in Whitman’s poetry, while this is clearly not the case with Dickinson. Both Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson are a part of American Romanticism but are at the same time completely
Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson were both poets who wrote about the concept of death. The two poets illustrated different perspectives on death. Whitman identified with the entirety and truth of death; whereas, Dickinson pinpoints the dramatization of death. Walt Whitman’s message on death portrayed in his poetry is more compelling than that of Emily Dickinson’s. Whitman discusses the favorableness of death, the verisimilitude that pertains to death, and his elaborate explanations on how we humans understand death.
“When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” by Walt Whitman is the recollection of a speaker that attended an astronomer’s lecture only to be bored and leaves the room to enjoy the stars without scientific analyzation hindering their natural beauty. On the other hand, “324” by Emily Dickinson demonstrates the role of nature in the speaker’s personal connection to religion and God instead of attending Church and sermons. Although their topics seem so unlike, the poetic devices within them have both similarities and differences. Whitman’s and Dickinson’s poems bear many differences, including structure, meter, and rhyme, while remaining alike in their use of imagery to convey like attitudes towards traditionalism and nature.
While both are famous trailblazers the two are vastly different. Incipiently, both poets Emily Dickinson and poet Walt Whitman were well known poets one is considered to be one of America's greatest and most original poets, taking definition as her provience and challenging the existing definitions of poetry and a poet’s work, Whitman on the other hand was considered to be a latter day successor to Homer, Shakespeare and Dante, creating monumental work through the chatted praises from body to soul, found beauty and ressourance in death. Both poets come from opposite backgrounds, and while they both share inspirational sources, they do so in distinctive ways. Analyzing two seperate poems from Emily Dickinson and Whitman, I will be comparing and contrasting the poems as I go through
Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson’s poetry is very different; however death seems to be a familiar topic amongst both poets. Opposites attract, and you could say the same for Whitman and Dickinson because though they have different writing styles both repeatedly write about death. Once more, although both Whitman and Dickinson have many different feelings about death, they also share many similar feelings about it as well. Although Walt Whitman's poetry is rather long and quite simple and Emily Dickinson's are often short and complex, the theme of death strongly ties their works together.
Emily Dickinson and Edgar Allan Poe were histories most proficient writers and their work speaks for itself. They were born in the same time frame and they knew a lot about each other’s work. Their life lessons are what contributed to their remarkable poetry writing and what made them who they are today. Poe and Dickinson do share similar topics in their poetry writing, some are also dissimilar in which all of them focuses a lot on pain, death, love and nature.
When so much of one’s life is left up to chance, it is nice to know that one can find certainty in death. Whereas life can be moulded to perfection and death is a guarantee, there is no way to tell what one will face following death. There are millions of different cultures, religions, and individual beliefs pertaining to the afterlife, but a definitive answer will never be known. The works of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson express two very unique interpretations of death and what follows. Both Whitman’s and Dickinson’s views of death include an idea of an afterlife, or of a continuation of the soul post death, but where Whitman welcomes the idea of demise without a trace of fear and his overall view of death is more mystical, Dickinson has a negative view of death and, at times, questions the possibility of an afterlife entirely.
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
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.
Whitman was able to change people’s views on life and was able to give people something that they wanted and were looking for in his creation of a new writing style. His writing about real life experiences connected him well with the common man, which is another aspect of the Romantic period. Whitman is also thought of as the “father of free verse.” He enjoyed using free verse because it could further distinguish him from other writers of the past, and of his time.
Walt Whitman's poetry is relatively formless and his random patterns have a significant effect on the meaning evoked from the poems. Whitman has a constant theme of the link between nature/natural experience and humans. He expresses his emotions and opinions through his poems. Some of his poems are very personable, which makes them very easier to understand and more enjoyable to read.
Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson's works have numerous differences. Compared to Dickinson's short and seemingly simple poems, Whitman's are long and often complex. Both pioneered their own unique style of writing.
On this verse, we can see how Whitman tries to connect to mind, body, spirit and nature. In “Song of Myself” Whitman attempted to change the meaning of American poetry. I described identity issues that pertain to him, but that the audience was able to identify with. Whitman, opened the door to
Emily Dickinson’s reclusive life was arguably a result of her proposed bi-polar disorder. This life and disorder unduly influenced the themes of her poetry. She chose not to associate herself with society and volumes of her poems, published posthumously, examine this idea as well as the themes of nature and death. The clearest examples of these themes are presented in the following analysis of just of few of her
The nineteenth century produced many esteemed authors, including Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman who became two of Americas most popular poets. While vastly different in style and personality, both Dickinson and Whitman relate to many people on an emotional level through their poetry, even in the twenty-first century. The works of poetry by Dickinson and Whitman can be compared on levels of style and form and both writers composed beautiful verses of high quality. Through the following comparisons, it will become apparent how Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman influenced American literature and culture both in similar and diverse ways.