Luke Morris
10/01/2002
Whitman and Dickinson
The nineteenth century, and particularly the Civil War era, produced a distinctively American idea of poetry, dissimilar from that of Europe and even from that of previous American poets. This time period involved a literary transition, from the Romantic period of the early part of the century to the Realism and Naturalism that authors would soon adopt. Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson exemplify much of the contrast in this time period, through the differences in the way they lived their lives, among other things. The former, for instance, was a populist poet who cultivated his public image, while the latter was a recluse, most of whose work her sister published posthumously for her. The most striking disparities between the two, though, are in the writings themselves. Whitman, for instance, employs organic form in his poetic statements, whereas Dickinson as a rule sticks to more structured, formal poems. The ‘Gray Poet’ also uses long and expansively detailed wordings to express his point, while Miss Emily keeps her works concise and her meanings veiled. The two differ the most, though, in their philosophical viewpoints, as Whitman presents a Romantic, uplifting view of nature and man, while Dickinson focuses more on the darkness of pain, death, and the unanswered questions of God.
Walt Whitman wrote poetry in a freely flowing organic form, allowing his thoughts to express what they will and as they will, while Emily Dickinson’s creations are generally more structured and formal, in the vein of classical poetry. Whitman, for one, demonstrates his unrestricted style in Song of Myself, where he states,
“I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass” (1).
The poet obviously does not stick to strict form in these lines, since there is little regard for line length except as it is necessary to convey his point. Nor does he use any rhyme scheme, or any particular scansion in his lines, and in so ordering his poems he shows the haphazardness suited to his ‘everyman’ persona. Whitman pays little heed to conventions of line length and rhythm, allowing his pen to simply state, almost in a stream-of-consciousness style, whatever he wishes to say, in whatever way it comes to him. He describes one scene he observes as such:
“I saw the marriage of a trapper in the open air in the far west, the bride was a red
girl,
Her father and his friends sat near cross-legged and dumbly smoking, they had
moccasins to their feet and large thick blankets hanging from their shoulders”
(Song 10).
Though these lines do have a certain rhythm, they obviously follow no particular rules, but rather do they allow his description to take on what form it will, organically, as he sees the situation. Dickinson, on the other hand, usually adapts her thoughts into relatively strict formal standards, as in,
“I never lost as much but twice,
And that was in the sod.
Twice have I stood a beggar
Before the door of God!” (49)
One can see in this piece that the poet does take advantage of the rules of prosody, using an alternating iambic tetrameter/trimeter line pattern, with end rhymes on every other line, as in ‘sod’ and ‘God’. She intends to communicate, in this work, her earlier sense of loss and pain, as well as her anger at God, but she does so within lyrical conventions, as Emerson might have done, rather than allowing lines to run on in random lengths without a sense of timing. Thus, Miss Dickinson shows herself much more committed to poetic formality than does her Romantic counterpart.
Whitman and Dickinson differ not only in regards to their adherence to poetic convention, (or lack thereof), but also in the length and detail of their works. While the ‘democratic poet’ wrote long, wordy, and richly detailed poems, utilizing explicit visual imagery to encompass his entire, unrestrained process of thought, his female foil kept her works concise and her thoughts well veiled, revealing little in words that yet encompass a world of thinking. For Whitman, writing is a joy, an uncensored release in which he simply lets the flow of his experience pour out on paper. Dickinson, on the other hand, seems to have put forth a tremendous effort to get words on a page, and, indeed, writing for her may have been a painful process for her repressed psyche. Whitman shows his love of the free flow of thought and richly detailed lines as he writes,
“I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain’d,
I stand and look at them long and long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things”
(Song 32).
Whitman here uses animals as a metaphor for what man ought to be, and he does so in expressive detail, showing every aspect in which the simple lives of beasts are superior to the complicated problems of man. Miss Emily, in discussing a different topic, does so in the opposite way, as she states,
“‘Faith’ is a fine invention
When Gentlemen can see –
But Microscopes are prudent
In an Emergency” (185).
In this poem, through vague references, Dickinson implies that “Faith” works for men when they can see unaided what is happening in the world, but ‘In an Emergency,’ when one must examine something clearly, he must use something more, a ‘Microscope,’ as it were. These inferences are certainly not as obvious and striking as those above, since the latter poet veils her meanings and states her point in few words, without any of the lavish detail of Whitman’s expanded verse. She likewise demonstrates this succinctness and vague meaning when she writes,
“He questioned softly “Why I failed”?
“For Beauty,” I replied –
“And I – for Truth – Themselves are One –
We Bretheren, are,” He said –” (449)
In this work, again, one may hardly begin to guess at what she means, since the entire work is so short, and she gives woefully little detail, so that the reader must delve into it himself and expand it in an attempt to work out her meaning, which differs drastically from the overbearing, wordy detail of Whitman, which one must actually compound, or ‘bring down,’ to decipher.
Though Whitman and Dickinson contrast greatly in their formal structure, as well as the length and detail of their works, the most outstanding difference between the two may be their philosophical outlooks on life. Whitman, for instance, while acknowledging the existence of evil, nevertheless expressed Romantic admiration for the beauty of nature and the potential of man, in all of which he espied a divine quality, whereas Dickinson’s poetry focused on pain, death, and the question of whether God is truly present and caring. Whitman directly shows his uplifting view of the world as he states,
“I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then,
In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass,
I find letters from God dropt in the street, and every one is signed by God’s name. . . (Song 48)
And as to you Death, and you bitter hug of mortality, it is idle to try to alarm me” (49).
The poet thus demonstrates a universal, pantheistic view of nature, in which everything carries a spark of the divine, and therefore he has no fear of death and no concern for pain, since it is all part of his bright, glorious, living universe. He views himself as a universal ‘I’, encompassing all of creation and finding meaning in it all, as he writes,
“It avails not, time nor place – distance avails not,
I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations
hence,
Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt,
Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd,
Just as you are refresh’d by the gladness of the river and the bright flow, I was
refreshed” (Crossing Brooklyn Ferry 3).
He thus expresses, through an all-encompassing view, his appreciation for the beauty of man and nature, and the interconnectedness of all things. Dickinson, on the other hand, sees little that is bright in life, and so she focuses her work instead on a personal, all-consuming pain, as in,
“Pain – has an Element of Blank –
It cannot recollect
When it begun – or if there were
A time when it was not –” (650).
Pain, for Dickinson, consumes everything so totally that it makes time stop, and makes everything true, bringing those who experience it back into contact with a hard reality that can only end in death, with the fear of an uncaring God waiting thereafter. While Whitman’s perspective is universal, Dickinson’s is personal, focused solely on her own experiences and thoughts, and therefore all of her work seems to take place within her mind, where naught but pain and death dwell. As she states in a poem written from the perspective of one who has died,
“With Blue – uncertain stumbling Buzz –
Between the light – and me –
And then the Windows failed – and then
I could not see to see –” (465).
In other words, she loses her sight at death, and cannot witness the presence of God - meaning that he may not have come, and life, death, and her own pain are therefore meaningless. This view directly contradicts that of Whitman, to whom pain and death are but fleeting elements of the perfect, organic whole of nature, and within all of which God resides.
Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson are both exemplary literary representatives of their time, but their writings are as different as those of two poets can be. First, Dickinson writes mostly well-structured poetry within the basic rules, while Whitman sticks to an open, unrestricted organic form. Their literary paths also diverge in the way that the ‘Gray Poet’ words his lines, long-winded and with liberal detail, versus Miss Emily’s concise and rather vague verse. And, lastly, Whitman’s writings encompass a universal philosophical viewpoint, which gives him an uplifting view of man, nature, and God, whereas Dickinson’s work is purely personal, with a constant eye towards pain, death, and God’s potential cruelty.