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

why Emily Dickinson is considered to be a revolutionary poet is her unusual style of writing. She never borrowed another poet´s language or a certain diction. Or as Timothy Morris puts it in his article “The Development of Dickinson´s Style”, “She never adopted conventional technique, but started very early with something idiosyncratic and then revised her own idiosyncrasies” (40). Most of her poems are rather short and compressed, but still quite complex especially because of the symbolic and often ambigious language she uses (Morris 36-37). As an illustration, she uses the image of lighting to convey truth in her poem “Tell all the truth but tell it slant”, “As Lightning to the children eased/ With explanation kind/ The Truth must dazzle gradually/ Or every man be blind-“ (Baym and Levine 108). What she is actually saying is that children are afraid of a certain slant of light just like men are afraid of a certain truth or knowledge, and that one needs to learn about it gradually and not apruptly in order to understand it.
Apart from her symbolic language, it is her use of stylistic devices that makes her style so very distinctive. First, she uses enjambment, a sentence or clause that continues over two or more lines. Traditional poems are most often end-stopped, meaning the end of a sentence and the end of a verse coincide (Morris 32). An example for that can be found in Dickinson´s poem “These are the days when Birds come back”: “And softly thro´the altered air/ Hurries a timid leaf” (Dickinson). According to the Norton Anthology of American Literature 1865-1914 her “use of enjambment […] forced her reader to learn where to pause to collect the sense before reading on, often creating dizzying ambiguities” (91). Apart from that one can find another frequently used stylistic device of hers in the quote of “These are the days when Birds come back”, which is the capitalization of words that would normally not be capitalized, in this case “Birds”. Dickinson does that in several other poems, perhaps to highlight certain words or phrases.
But what she is really known for is not enjambment or capitalization but her unusual usage of her dashes.

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

one.
Most of Dickinson´s poems are in common meter, meaning four iambic lines with an exact rhyme scheme (either abab or abcb), but in a way that is nowadays known as “off” or “slant” rhymes (Baym and Levine 91). That means that she did not only use exact rhymes (e.g. “succeed” – “need”), but consonantal rhymes (e.g. “afternoon” – “crown”) or vowel rhymes (“way” – “sea”) as well (Morris 30-31). This can be seen in the first stanza of “This is my letter to the World:

This is my letter to the World
That never wrote to Me –
The simple News that Nature told –
With tender Majesty (Baym and Levine 103)

Her early poems are mainly in exact rhymes but the rhyme scheme becomes less and less conventional, although she wrote very few poems in free verse (Morris 31-32). But in using these slant rhymes, Dickinson managed to escape the traditional style of hymns (Morris 27). Moreover, one could say that she transformed the traditional form and at the same time invented a new, very unique poetic style all by herself.
Walt Whitman´s style on the other hand primarily made up of his really realistic and picturesque language (Warren 379). He barely uses metaphors or symbols, but rather writes in a very figurative way, as to be seen in his poem “Cavalry Crossing a Ford”: “Behold the brown-faced men, each group, each person a picture, the negligent rest on the saddles” (Whitman). Apart from that Whitman was able to make his verses sound very melodic just because of his word choice, as to be seen in his poem “Reconciliation”: “That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly softly wash again”. The soft sibilants he chose in that verse emphasize the process of washing, or in other words his diction supports the content of the poem.
One of Whitman´s most famous poem is the elegy “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom´d”, in which he tried to get Abraham Lincoln´s death out of his system. But apart from that it is a paragon of his style, as can be seen in the fifth section of the poem:

Over the breast of the spring, the land, the amid cities,
Amid lanes and through old woods, where lately the violets peep´d from the ground,
spotting the gray debris,
Amid the grass in the fields each side of the lanes, passing the endless grass,
Passing the yellow-spear´d wheat, every grain from its shroud in the darkbrown
fields uprisen,
Passing the apple-tree blows of white and pink in the orchards,
Carrying a corpse to where it shall rest in the grave,
Night and day journeys a coffin. (Baym and Levine 80)

The first thing that might leap to the eye are the very long, almost prose-like verses. In contrast to that the last line of the stanza is relatively short (something that occurs often in Whitman´s poems), which makes it stand out and almost gives the impression of the speaker´s breakdown after all these long lines. Apart from that, one thing that is typical for Whitman´s style is his use of repetitions. He wrote almost all of his poems in free verses, meaning without a conventional rhyme scheme, he used different kinds of repetitions instead to create the effect of rhythm: The first and most frequently used one is the anaphora, meaning the repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of lines, for example “passing the endless grass/ Passing the yellow-spear´d wheat”. Second, he used epistrophes, meaning the repetition of a word or phrase at the end of verses and lastly the symploce, meaning the repitition of words or phrases in the beginning and in the end of verses (Warren 383). In addition to repitition, Whitman also used lists or rather catalogues to produce rhythm in his poems (Warren 378), as to be seen in the section eleven of “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom´d”: “[…] With floods of the yellow gold of the gorgeous, indolent, sinking sun, burning, expanding the air”.
As mentioned before, Whitman wrote almost all of his poems in free verses. In fact, his poems show an absence of traditional verse and stanza structures (Baym and Levine 22). Additionally, he experimented not only with form and rhythm but also with meter. Most of his poems are written in trochee (one stressed syllable followed by one unstressed one) and not in iambus (one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed one), which is the most frequently used meter in English poetry and English language in general. These unusual poetic structures make Whitman´s style very innovative and unique.
In comparing the styles of Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman one can say that although the topics they wrote about might have overlapped sometimes (for example death or the self and nature), their writing styles differ quite significantly from one another. Where Dickinson focuses on the inner life and on mystical incidents, Whitman focuses on the everyday world and on a realistic surrounding. Dickinson´s poem are short and compressed, whereas Whitman´s poems tend to be very long. Dickinson´s writing seems to be rather inward-directed, id est written more for herself than for other people (Morris 41), Whitman´s writing on the contrary seems to be made for a public audience.
But what both of them have in common is that they went beyound the boundaries of traditional and conventional poetry, each one in their own very distinctive way. Their experimental and sometimes even a little weird approaches to poetry indeed revolutionized poetry, but American poetry in particular, that is why it is still important to reflect on these extraordinary poets at the present day.