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Whitman and Dickinson
A New American Poetry
Expressing American Ideas
During the period in American History
known as Conflict and Celebration, there
were several poets who began to write
differently than people had written before.
Their writing style was more modern; they
broke with traditional styles. Among these
poets were Walt Whitman and Emily
Dickinson.
Both lived during the period of Realism but
were inspired by the themes and styles of
Romanticism.
Whitman’s Poetic Elements
Free verse
Cadence
Run of words that rise and fall to make emphasis of
thought
Need to read poems aloud to hear cadence
Other poetic elements
Assonance
Alliteration
Onomatopoeia
Parallel structure
Imagery
Dickinson’s Poetic Elements
Dickinson is known for using poetry as
private observation.
Her poems are carefully crafted in
rhyme and meter.
Complex, unusual style, which is
characterized by:
the use of dashes
slant rhyme
ambiguous, elusive language.
Expressing American Ideas
They used these new writing styles to express
uniquely American ideas. Although both Whitman
and Dickinson are considered modern writers,
their writings can be compared and contrasted in
many ways.
There are by far more differences in the writing
styles of Whitman and Dickinson than there are
similarities.
Whitman vs. Dickinson
structure of poems
Whitman’s poems
lack any structure.
Whitman’s poems
tend to run on and
on
no set length for his
poems, stanzas, or
even lines.
Dickinson has a
definite structure.
She wrote ballad
stanzas, which were
four line stanzas
alternating in iambic
tetrameter and trimeter.
Whitman vs. Dickinson
use of rhyme
As with structure,
Whitman’s poetry has no
rhyme. In this way
Whitman also breaks from
tradition.
Whitman’s poems make
use of free verse. This is
poetry that is written
without concern for
regular rhyme schemes
and meter.
Dickinson’s poems,
unlike Whitman’s,
make use of slant
rhyme. This is the use
of near or approximate
rhymes, and is a
relatively modern idea.
Similarities:
use of modern ideas and concepts in poetry
One of the poetic
“tools” which
Whitman uses is
cataloguing, or
enumeration.
Catalogs are long lists
of related things,
people, or events.
One of Dickinson’s
modern “tools” is her use
of startling imagery.
Typical of her writing are
the use of dashes that
break the lines, and serve
to keep them open.
Most of her poems are
short, but they take you on
an infinite trip; they look
simple enough, but what
you see is not what you
get.
An interesting point of comparison on
Whitman and Dickinson:
They are alike in the fact that they are not necessarily
transcendentalists, but often express
transcendentalist views in their poems
Even though both lived during the time of realism
they interpret nature through their poetry and use
poetry as a vehicle to participate in nature’s beauty and
transcendentalism.
They both find inspiration from nature and find an
expression or reflection of the soul in nature.