Similarities Between The Works Of Emily Dickinson And Walt Whitman

The poems written by Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman have numerous differences, For example, the Dickinson’s poems are simple and short while Whitman’s poems are complex and long. Though there are similarities between the writers: one of which is, that both Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman are considered today by many to be the founders of modern American poetry. There are other points that we can compare and contrast, so lets get started.

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, on December 10, 1830 to Edward and Emily Dickinson. By the time of Emily’s early childhood, there were three children in the household. Her brother, William Austin Dickinson,Who was a year and a half older. Her sister, Lavinia Norcross Dickinson, was born in 1833. All three children attended the one-room primary school in Amherst and then moved on to Amherst Academy, the school out of which Amherst College had grown.Dickinson found the conventional religious wisdom the least compelling part of these arguments.

From what she read and what she heard at Amherst Academy, scientific observation proved its excellence in powerful description. The writer who could say what he saw was invariably the writer who opened the greatest meaning to his readers.

While this definition fit well with the science practiced by natural historians such as Hitchcock and Lincoln, it also articulates the poetic theory then being formed by a writer with whom Dickinson’s name was often later linked.While the strength of Amherst Academy lay in its emphasis on science, it also contributed to Dickinson’s development as a poet. The seven years at the academy provided her with her first “Master,” Leonard Humphrey, who served as principal of the academy from 1846 to 1848. Although Dickinson undoubtedly esteemed him while she was a student, her response to his unexpected death in 1850 clearly suggests her growing poetic interest. Most of Emily Dickinson's poems are written in short stanzas, mostly quatrains, with short lines, usually rhyming only on the second and fourth lines. Other stanzas employ triplets or pairs of couplets, and a few poems

employ longer, looser, and more complicated stanzas. Iambic rhythms dominate, but they are varied and loosened, speeded and slowed, in many ways. A large number of Dickinson's rhymes are what we call partial, slant, or off-rhymes, some of these so faint as to be barely recognizable. These stanza forms and, to a lesser extent, her poetic rhymes took their chief source from the standard Protestant hymns of her day, largely from those of Isaac Watts.
Born on May 31, 1819, Walt Whitman was the second son of Walter Whitman, a housebuilder, and Louisa Van Velsor. The family, which consisted of nine children, lived in Brooklyn and Long Island in the 1820s and 1830s. At the age of twelve, Whitman began to learn