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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Emily was a withdrawn person to the point of eccentricity.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...
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…
Sources
Poem Hunter; Dickinson.
http://www.poemhunter.com/emily-dickinson/
Poem hunter.com. Whitman.
http://www.poemhunter.com/walt-whitman
Whitman and Dickinson During the conflict and celebration period in America, different authors started to write differently than what had been written by other people. They embraced modern writing styles and broke them with traditional writing styles. Emily Dickson and Walt Whitman are among these writers. They adopted new styles of writing to express American ideas uniquely. Although both writers are regarded as modern writers, their writing styles can be
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Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson project, in their poetry, an individual identity that achieves its power from within, thus placing a premium on the individual self. Ironically, this premium on the individual self was very much in vogue in America at the time; from Emerson to the early pioneers of 19th century industrialism. As a result, their projections of individual power were greatly influenced by the culture in which
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The spider is working upon a canvas, referring to it as an "Arc of White" (Dickinson 3) and the mood of the poem is that the spider is quite content to be this way. The spider is working at night and it is the only thing that can contribute to his project. The spider is grounded in his task and while it might look as though there is no
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