Whitman And Dickinson's Poetry Compare And Contrast example essay topic

Walt Whitman and Emily are two of the best US writers in the last 2 centuries. All of their poetry has been well received and they had inspired many generations in the USA. In the following paragraph I am going compare these two great writers of the last two centuries. "Pictures" implies Whitman feels that all people have their own world inside of their brains, unique and incapable of being imitated. The brain to Whitman holds an expanding inventory of pictures, made up of both things remembered and things imagined. Whitman uses a barrage of realistic and descriptive imagery to give the reader a feeling for what is going on in the inside of his head.

As the poem progresses, subjects change as fast as the reader can picture them. Unlike Whitman, Dickinson does not open up the brain for the reader to tour; she keeps it closed, not only by her description but also through form. Whitman is clearly at the very least an active participant in the journey through his mind... He is the tour guide and thus the controller of the journey.

The poet determines the twists and turns as well as the destination of the journey. In Dickinson's poems, it is her journey rather than ours. While reading Whitman, I felt as though I was being taken on a guided tour of his brain. Dickinson, however, let me choose my own path through hers, and each journey I took was amazingly different. In "Pictures", Whitman leads us on a journey through his brain.

He is our "cicerone", our guide, and we, the audience, are sightseers... Dickinson's brain is dark. In Dickinson's poem 1727, the brain is more than a tool for the human possessing it to feel, know, reason, and understand things; the brain is more independent of the person; it is a vessel of its own. To Whitman, the brain is owned by the person and is used feverishly, expanding and moving items around inside of it. Dickinson's literalism is the obverse of Whitman's analogy. She would agree that form and force, the letter and the spirit of language, are interchangeable; however, she regards poetic language not as the identity of these two axes of meaning but as the ground of their very differentiation.

The difficulty in bringing together Whitman and Dickinson lies only superficially in her political indifference. More fundamentally, it can be located in her acceptance of doubt as a legitimate state of mind, in the attitude that led her to question whether nature was 'apocalypse' or 'experiment,' and to put the word 'experiment' as her final choice."It seems that with years the poetic process became more and more important for Dickinson -- more vital, in fact, than its destination, the truth of the finished poem. This is as much as to say that the essence of the total work is quest, regardless of the fact that it can never be completed since there is no final truth, no final form to be reached. Similarly, Whitman's final truth always recedes beyond the horizon.

Consequently, what matters for both artists is the journey itself, the effort of consciousness. Whitman and Dickinson sanctify the creative process rather than worship the finished form. Both Whitman and Dickinson... posit the centrality of the artist's consciousness. The difference is that Whitman's projection is affective and sympathetic. He is Adam naming for himself a whole new world into being. Dickinson has experienced the intellectual fall.

She can but watch herself create a world of meanings. Constructing analogies, detecting correspondences are the ways of both human perception and human emotional need while the 'Single Hound' of consciousness must forever question the truths of its own making. Whitman and Dickinson are Independent writers, they are non traditional, un restrictive and spontaneous. They both used alliterations, refrains, diction's, imagery, stanzas, consonances and symbols. In other words they are the perfect writers that USA have had.