Poetic Counterparts- A Comparison between Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson

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drove --- He knew no haste”, showing her peaceful and calm mindset towards death. Actually, in the first stanza, “The Carriage held but just ourselves --- And Immortality,” has already told her attitude towards death: together with death, there came immortality. The comparison between the transience of man’s life and the eternity of God in the last stanza also showed that she enjoyed the death.

Different writing styles

Just judging from the lengths of Whitman’s and Dickinson’s poems, we can already tell the difference of their styles. The most conspicuous differences between the two poets lie in their special techniques.

The most distinctive characteristics of Whitman’s poetry are the use of repetition, parallelism, rhetorical mannerisms, the adoption of the natural cadences of speech in poetry, and the employment of the phrases instead of the good as a unit of rhythm. Most notably, to comprehensively express himself, Whitman broke the conventional poetic form and extensively used free verse in his poems. Disobeying the iambic pentameter form, he tried to approximate the natural cadences of speech in his poetry, carefully varying the length of his lines according to his intended emphasis while ensuring every aspect of life was able to speak without restraint. In I Hear American Singing, there are the paralleling singings of a multitude of people ranging from the carpenter, the mason, the boatman, the shoemaker, the wood-cutter, the plough boy, the mother to the young wife; in O Captain! My Captain!, there are the repetitions of ”O Captain! My Captain! ”, ”on the deck my Captain lies” and “Fallen cold and dead”, which strongly help express Whitman’s profound love for Lincoln and his desperate sorrow for his death.

Dickinson, however, was famous for her startling and original diction. Her poems, terse, simple and direct, marked with her style of no title, capitalized words, dashes to create cadence, images and symbols, establish her as one of America’s great lyric poets. “Her gemlike poems are short, fresh and original, marked by the vigor of her images, the daring of her thought and the beauty of her expression.” Simple and even unusual as some of her words are, they are thought-provoking and of fundamental meanings. In Because I could not Stop for Death, she personified death as a carriage-driver, compared the journey to death as travelling by carriage and compared “children”, ”the Fields of Gazing Grain” and ”the Setting Sun” to childhood, adulthood and old age respectively, thus displayed her feelings towards death in a vivid and expressive way.

Conclusion

In conclusion, while Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson both commenced a new era in American literature, they varied from each other in diverse ways. Whitman was a part of the transition between transcendentalism and realism, incorporating both views in his works and is often called the father of free verse; whereas, Emily Dickinson, adept at employing images in her poetry, greatly influenced further Imagists such as Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell, and became, with Stephan Crane, the precursor of the Imagist movement. In the development of American literature, they

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both made indispensable contributions.

Works Cited

An Introduction to English and American Romantic Poetry, Page 320, Line 8 A Survey of American Literature, Chang Yaoxin,1999

Selected Readings in English and American Literature, 387,Wu Xianglin, 2005.9