Dickinson and Whitman

Dickinson writes in short lines, Whitman in long. Why do these choices seem appropriate for their particular subject matters. Refer to particular poems of each poet to exemplify your points and your own poems to suggest how what you learned in writing them might help you in understanding the choices of the poets. Don't forget, this is an essay and as such requires a thesis as to why the consideration of this topic matters, not in some perfunctory way but how you have found a way to view it meaningfully.

It is interesting that both Dickinson's poetry and Whitman's poetry mimic the character of the respective writers. Dickinson was introverted and abrupt to the point of eccentricity. Her poems too are abrupt and introverted. Whitman, on the other hand, was an extrovert… Verbose and chatty his poems are such too. The poems too may reflect Dickinson's expression of futility to describe the surreal; whilst Whitman, dealing with reality, can afford to elaborate. Emily was a withdrawn person to the point of eccentricity.

Deeply religious, she lived in almost total physical isolation for a large part of her life. (Poem Hunter; Dickinson.). Her poems are generally on reflective, introspective schemes and reflect the character of the author. Take this one, for instance, "on Life." Another poet, such as Whitman, would have drafted a glorious accolade to life full of nature or the boisterousness, perhaps, of living. Life to another poet would have spoken of the hub, bustle, noise, vivaciousness of living. To Emily Dickinson, however, it was of solitude and theft of individuality.

The essence is captured in severed sentences: I'm nobody! Who are you? Are you nobody, too? Then there's a pair of us -- don't tell! They'd banish us, you know. How dreary to be somebody! How public, like a frog To tell your name the livelong day To an admiring bog! Beautiful poem! Comical and deep and to the point. And quixotic of Emily Dickinson. So many of her other famous poems follow the same theme.

Take these for instance: These are the Days;; A Bird came down the Walk; This World is not Conclusion; I dwell in Possibility And more. All of these are reflective,; short sentences that hint at the endless vistas beyond vistas of metaphysical phenomena that Dickinson can only touch at with her pen never fully describe. This may be too why Dickinson deals with short sentences. Her poems largely deal with the mysteries of life. Dickinson -- and we -- can only scrabble at the surface.

So much more lies behind that we can only guess at. Walt Whitman on the other hand was a boisterous extrovert. There was nothing more that he liked than people. Whitman worked as a journalist, a teacher, a government clerk, and a volunteer nurse during the Civil War (Poem hunter.com. Whitman. ). Always with people, he was the reverse of Dickinson. His character is reflected in his poems: long, winded, chatty.

His poems too deal with physical phenomena -- the grittiness of the streets, the beauty of rural America, the sensuality of sexuality. This is a physical component that we can see, touch, taste, smell and, accordingly, (contrary to the metaphysis of Dickinson) elaborate on. Let us take this one, as different to an Emily Dickinson poem as can be.

Even the title -- among the Multitude -- is polar to Dickinson: MONG the men and women the multitude, I perceive one picking me out by secret and divine signs, Acknowledging none else, not parent, wife, husband, brother, child, any nearer than I am, Some are baffled, but that one is not -- that one knows me. Ah lover and perfect equal, I meant that you should discover me so by faint indirections, And I when I meet you mean to discover you by the like in you.

Whitman thinks little about himself. He involves himself with the crowd and becomes one of them. Even though we are talking about love in this poem, the intimacy of love is still lost in the anonymity of the crowd. Dickinson would reverse the love by imbuing it with an egoistic feeling: describing the feeling.