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.
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.
Two Poets, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson are probably two of the most influential people in American poetry. They are regarded as the founders modern American poetry. Walt Whitman (1819-1892), for the time was breaking new ground with his diverse, energetic verse with regards to subject matter, form and style whether talking about overlooked objects in nature such as a single blade of grass or even our own hearing. Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) while living a life of seclusion, never really leaving her birthplace, was very adventurous internally. She was well read in English literature, often deeply exploring her own thoughts. While Dickinson and Whitman are referred to as the founders of modern American
Emily Elizabeth Dickinson and Edgar Allan Poe are two of the biggest poets in American Literature from the 1800s. They had many things in common from their writings about death and sadness, because of their unfortunate losses in life, to the fact that they were both born in Massachusetts. They were also different in many ways. They were different in the way they looked at life and wrote about their experiences from it. While it is obvious they had many differences, they also had many things in common from their lives to their styles of writing making them amazing writers.
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.
The first thing that compare and contrast is structure. Emily Dickinson and Langston Hughes both have dash like marks in their Poems. Like for instance in “Hope” its says “That perches in the soul-” (2) and in “Dreams Deferred” its says “Or fester like a sore-”(5). Now the difference between then is that Emily Dickinson has her poem more in order and Langston Hughes has them in order in the beginning but then there is extra spacing at the end. All the lines in “Hope” are in groups and in “Dreams Deferred” their are 7 lines together,there together and the other two. Well they have different structure because Langston Hughes lined to write freestyle
She also seems to portray them the same way using many similar forms of figurative language. It seems like Emily used poetry and her many forms of imagery, symbolism, personification, metaphors, repetition and allusions to portray her poems very similarly. She sounds like she was a fan of using all these forms of figurative language in a lot of her poems, especially in “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” and “I Heard a Fly Buzz- When I Died.” These two poems are very similar to each other in the fact they both share visions of how Emily Dickinson views death as a natural form and also use similar forms of figurative language to show it.
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’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.
Both authors have different tones for their poems. Whitman’s attitude while writing “I hear America Singing” was happy, joyful, and cheerful. From the way he looks at it, he has everything so everyone must be the same way. He views America as a perfect, beautiful place to live and work. “...at night the party of young fellows, robust, friendly, “Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs” (ll. 16-18). Whitman sounds merry and satisfied. After all the work, the Americans have fun and relax which is not usually the case and is expressed that way in Hughes’s poem.
Essentially I feel that each poem in its own “Funeral Blues” (W. H. Auden), “Death, be not proud” (John Donne), and “Because I could not stop for Death” (Emily Dickinson) are unique in their own way however, I feel that two poems in particular may show more similarity in each other versus all three being compared at once although, I will be comparing and contrasting all three poems towards the end of this essay. For example, When reading “Funeral Blues” (W. H. Auden), I felt a greater sense of similarity to “Because I could not stop for death” (Emily Dickinson) versus “Death, be not proud” (John Donne) so I will begin to discuss those poems first. When comparing each poem I will
Emily Dickinson wrote many poems in her lifetime. She writes two of my favorite poems. They are: ?I heard a Fly buzz when I died? and ?Because I could not stop for Death?. They both have similarities and differences from each other.
Walt Whitman 's poem, "To a Locomotive in Winter" and Emily Dickinson 's "I Like to See It Lap The Miles" are two different poems about the same subject, the steam engine. Where Whitman uses solely free verse, Dickinson’s poem more closely follows standard writing practices, with very structured line breaks. Another key difference in these works is the speech they use; Whitman uses "old English" laden with thee and thy, whereas Dickinson uses fairly modern terminology. Whitman describes the elegant and powerful grandeur of the locomotive from the shining brass and steel to the twinkling of the wheels. Dickinson describes the arrogance and nuisance of it as she imagines it staring down upon the
Ralph Waldo Emerson and Emily Dickinson were two of America’s most intriguing poets. They were both drawn to the transcendentalist movement which taught “unison of creation, the righteousness of humanity, and the preeminence of insight over logic and reason” (Woodberry 113). This movement also taught them to reject “religious authority” (Sherwood 66). By this declination of authority, they were able to express their individuality. It is through their acceptance of this individuality that will illustrate their ambiguities in their faith in God.