Dickinson Vs Whitman

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Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman are two of the most innovative poets of their time . Their poems, starkly similar in content, broke the boundaries of poetry. Both focus on themes of time and transience. Although both poets were underappreciated during their lifetimes, they are now regarded as the pioneers of the new age of poetry..
Emily Dickinson's poetry is a demonstration of the power of words. Her poems possess a multifaceted simplicity, leaving the reader to ponder the meaning of those spare stanzas. Dickinson's poems embrace concepts of fame, success, death: the very questions that we all seek to answer as humans. Her work, though, offers the wisdom with a light hand, almost playfully. " How dreary to be somebody/How public, like a …show more content…
For example, in “I died for Beauty- but was scarce” Dickinson focuses on how life moves on and different elements of life slowly disappear with time (such as outward appearance) . Dickinson also writes extensively about death, but without the fear that is almost a given in this subject.
Dickinson looked inside herself for inspiration, her subjects abstract and often personified. However, her outside circumstances also defined her poems. For example, the Civil War played a role in her poetry; in one poem, she exposed how the reality of war revealed the hollowness of the rhetoric used to justify it: "My Triumph lasted till the Drums/Had left the Dead alone/And then I dropped my Victory"
In "Because I could not stop for death", Death is portrayed as an almost friendly figure, a courtly beau who insists that the speaker put aside both "labor" and " leisure". Dickinson is seemingly unruffled in the face of death. This death holds no terrors. Their drive is slow, and they pass familiar sights along the way. Dickinson's vision of death in this poem is comforting, its normalcy interrupted only by the setting sun: "We passed the setting sun-/ Or rather- He passed …show more content…
The poetry is expansive, its topic found primarily inside him. Whitman too focused on the themes of transience and time in his body of work. He often wrote about regeneration. In “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” Whitman uses flowers, bushes, wheat, trees, and other plant life to signify the possibilities of regeneration and re-growth after death, namely Lincoln's death. Whitman’s poems touch on the idea of the individual, and the vastness of this individual. The speaker in “Song of Myself” carries the entire universe within him, and with it the pain and
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