A Contrasting Juxtaposition Of Emily Dickinson And Walt Whitman's Writing Styles

A Contrasting Juxtaposition of Emily Dickinson´s and Walt Whitman´s Writing Styles

According to the Norton Anthology of American Literature 1865-1914, Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman are “the nineteenth-century poets who exerted the greatest influence on American poetry to come” (93). If Dickinson and Whitman heard this quote during their lifetime, they probably would have wondered about it because they were barely known during their lifetime. Nevertheless both Dickinson and Whitman are nowadays known as two of America´s greatest poets because of their experimental and unconventioal approach to poetry that revolutionized the poetic tradition, although or maybe precisely because their poetic styles differ a lot from one another.

One reason

In her article “The Breath of Emily Dickinson´s Dashes” Ena Jung states: “Emily Dickinson´s dashes are among the most widely contested diacriticals in the modern literary canon” (1). They bear a meaning either in a visually, syntactically, expressively or rhetorically way, depending on the poem and its content (Jung 2). This can be seen in Dickinson´s poem “ Safe in their Alabaster Chambers”: “Grand go the Years – in the Crescent – above them” (Baym and Levine 94). With the usage of these dashes, Dickinson highlights the slow but steady passage of time and the tremendous size of the universe without really saying anything. It is the dashes that require the reader to pause. They interrupt the flow of reading and make the reader think about it. Jung argues that the dashes represent marks for breathing, both for the speaker and the reader (3). Actually Dickinson herself commented on her dashes in a letter to Emily Fowler around 1850. She said, “I wanted to write, and just tell you that me, and my spirit were fighting this morning. It isn´t known generally, and you mustn´t tell anybody…That isn´t an empty blank where I began – it is so full of affection that you can´t see any – that´s all” (Jung 2). One can definetely tell from this quote that Dickinson was aware of her unusual use of dashes and that people might have difficulties with understanding why she uses them the way she does, because their sense is not a direct but rather an indirect