...Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson are two of America’s greatest poets. They both wrote about death, life, and God. They also both had a love for nature and included it in their works. They led drastically different lifestyles and their writing styles were very different but the messages they presented through their writing were actually fairly similar. Their Life Dickinson and Whitman had very different upbringings. Dickinson came from a very wealthy family, attended an elite school, and also attended college. She lived a very introverted and reclusive life. She made few attempts to publish her work, choosing instead to share them privately with family and friends. During her lifetime only 7 of her poems were published only because she wrote them to others who had them published. Dickinson's youthful years were not without turmoil. Deaths of friends and relatives, including her young cousin Sophia Holland, prompted questions about death and immortality. Since her house was located near the town cemetery, Dickinson could not have ignored the frequent burials that later provided powerful imagery for her poems. Not having conventional religious views may have also contributed to her isolation. She did have a belief in God but it was different than the views held by her peers. Although Dickinson's friends, sister, father, and eventually brother all joined the church, Emily never did. In her later years, Dickinson increasingly withdrew from public...
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...David Deaton Mr. Huitt American Lit and Comp 24 January 2014 Dickinson versus Whitman Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson's works have numerous differences. Compared to Dickinson's short and seemingly simple poems, Whitman's are long and often complex. Yet both twentieth century writers share several similarities when scrutinized thoroughly. Though their approaches differ, they often deal with the same themes, and both pioneered their own unique style of writing. Using death as a theme is probably the strongest connection that Whitman and Dickinson share. Whitman's view on death is reflective of his belief in Transcendentalism. In "Song of Myself", Whitman uses the scientific principle of the conservation of energy to assert that there is life after death, because energy cannot be destroyed; only transformed. In stanza six, he writes "And what do you think has become of the women and children?/ They are alive and well somewhere,/ The smallest sprouts shows there is really no death" (Whitman 124-126). Whitman contends that life remains long after death, Dickinson's writings on death are more complex and contradictory. She personifies death, generally seeing as a lord or as a compelling lover. In one of her more popular poems, "Because I could not stop for Death", death is like a kindly courter. He picks her up in a "Carriage held but just for Ourselves-/ And Immortality" (Dickinson 3-4). Many of her other poems are about the moment of death, and what happens when the living...
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...Similarity, Differences, Dickinson and Whitman During the Ninetieth century, two critical poets that came about were Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman. These two poets are credited with laying the foundation of modern poetry because of the different poetic styles and messages they presented in their work. Dickson and Whitman came from two different types of lifestyles, which can be credited with shaping their core values. The main differences that exists between Dickinson and Whitman were their poetic styles, goals, and concerns. Even though there are many differences between Dickinson and Whitman, these two poets based all of their poems on their life experiences and memories that were made during their lives. Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman lived two completely different lives, but both had the same passion when it came to poetry. Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts and lived most of her life on her family’s farm. She lived a very secluded life that was based on her father’s...
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...Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman were the type of poets that had different types of writing than anyone else in their time. They often can be compared with each other and people favor different sides as a better poet. Emily Dickinson, was an inside person, who didn’t go out often and wasn’t very social. She is often seen as one of America’s greatest poets, but she didn’t get recognized as a great poet for a while. She lived at her parents house her whole life except for one year. Her poems are often hard to interpret but once someone gets them down they can really get the whole meaning of the poem and it is often a good story. Her poems include subjects like religion, death-obsessed, psychic pain, and joy. She is recognized as a Calvinist...
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...find poetry entertaining. Two of the greatest American poets are Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman. These 1800s poets have a unique writing style; however, on opposite ends of the poetry spectrum. Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman only share a few similarities. They were extravagant composers in the late 1800s; furthermore, they both contributed to the American literature collection. Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman poems enclosed poetic lines and stanzas. Their poems were modern and challenged the traditional characteristics, and they both choose to write about mundane principals (Howard). The two poet’s contents are extremely different. Emily Dickinson would write about the conventional circumstances and discus the brutal side of life. Emily Dickinson would place a vast amount of symbolism and imagery. Since Emily Dickinson isolated herself, her verses would contain ample amounts depressing thoughts. She would also devise about her own ideas and what she was passionate about (Calvano). Walt Whitman uttered his courageous personality in his writings. Needing an idea to write about, Walt Whitman would take something that was decent in life and then just...
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..."The two giants of 19th-century American poetry who played the greatest role in redefining modern verse are Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson" (Burt). Both poets Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman are considered as the founders of today’s modern American poetry that are tried to revalue the poetry of the last century. Sooner or later, but they succeeded. They put the keystone of the modern American poetry which drifted in the breeze. The poetry has been redefined in a way to be able to get to the modern society's cultural level. The modern poetry becomes more discreet and it uses the topics of everyday life spiced with emotions. The emotions of the human being began to depict a higher quality. By the poets, so to speak, the mankind adjusts to...
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...Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson are two of the most significant writers during the 19th century. Whitman and Dickinson are interesting writers because they both had a very unique and powerful style of writing, which can be seen in the poems “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” and poem “236.” By comparing and contrasting Walt Whitman’s poem, “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” and Emily Dickinson’s poem “236,” people will see the similarities and the differences in many ways, but both poems have a very powerful message written within the words. The two poems are similar in innumerable ways. For example, in the poem “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer,” the narrator is in a lecture room listening to an educated astronomer talk about the...
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...Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson are both influential poets, who have inspired many young writers. The two authors vary significantly from one another. They both have unique style, content, and approach to writing. Whitman writes in a lengthy manner. “Song of Myself” spans many pages and contains long and descriptive lines. An example of his elongated style is, “I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women/And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken soon/out of their laps” (Norton Anthology 1028). This thought is expressed over three lines of his poem. This style contributes to the descriptive and eloquent nature of Whitman’s poetry. The reader absorbs much from his writing. In contrast to Whitman, Dickinson writes in an incredibly choppy style. For example, she states, “Flow plain – and foreign /On my homesick eye -/Except that You than He/Shone closer by-…”(Norton Anthology 1210). This style is evident in all of her works. It evokes a haunted feeling from the reader....
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...alt Whitman 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 the printer's trade, and fell in love with the written word. Largely self-taught, he read voraciously, becoming acquainted with the works of Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and the Bible. Whitman worked as a printer in New York City until a devastating fire in the printing district demolished the industry. In 1836, at the age of 17, he began his career as teacher in the one-room school houses of Long Island. He continued to teach until 1841, when he turned to journalism as a full-time career. He founded a weekly newspaper, Long-Islander, and later edited a number of Brooklyn and New York papers. In 1848, Whitman left the Brooklyn Daily Eagle to become editor of the New Orleans Crescent. It was in New Orleans that he experienced at first hand the viciousness of slavery in the slave markets of that city. On his return to Brooklyn in the fall of 1848, he founded a "free soil" newspaper, the Brooklyn Freeman, and continued to develop the unique style of poetry that later so astonished Ralph Waldo Emerson. In 1855, Whitman took out a copyright on the first edition of Leaves of Grass (self-published), which consisted of twelve untitled poems and a preface. He published the volume himself, and sent a copy to...
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...Although the poets Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman were alive around the same time, they had different interpretations of death in their poems. Both of the poems, “I heard a fly buzz- when I died” from Emily Dickins and “Song of Myself” from Walt Whitman, express their disparate perspective about the theme of death. In the two poems, the poets also have diverse approaches of conveying their conception of death. Which is either optimistically or depressingly. Consequently, it accentuates the differences of the mood in both poem and style of the authors. Emily Dickinson is most famous for her gloomy poems that illustrate the concept of death. For example, her poem “I heard a fly buzz- when I died” and “After Great Pain, A Formal Feeling Comes”....
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...Rate This Paper: 1 2 3 4 5 Length: 1371 words (3.9 double-spaced pages) Rating: Red (FREE) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Emily Dickinson was born on December 10, 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts. She died in the same place on May 15, 1886. Today people know her as a fascinating, talented writer. Most of the pieces Emily wrote were poems. Emily was a very isolated individual. She rarely ever got out or had any contact with anybody outside of her home. Along with writing her poems she wrote letters to the people that she did have contact with. In the letters that she would write there would be poems somewhere within them. Emily wrote a total of 1,775 poems in her lifetime. Even though she wrote these poems she never let it be known that she had the capability to write poems with such elegance. All of the poems that she would write she kept hidden somewhere in her room. She would hide the poems in places like her window, under her bed, in corners of the room, and lots of other places. After Emily’s death the truth would be told about her secret talent. Emily’s sister, Lavinia Dickinson found around 900 of the poems Emily had hidden in her room. Her sister decided that the poems were good enough to be published. She went to a friend of the family where she would get help in editing and publishing the poems. Lavinia’s friend, Mabel Loomis Todd and a friend of hers, Thomas Wentworth Higginson began to...
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...author, and state your answers in bullet form. * Marion Walker Alcaro, 97, passed away on Dec. 13, 2009 in Holland, Mich * She graduated from Sweet Briar College in 1935 * During the ensuing forty years she raised three sons, managed her husband’s medical office and authored numerous articles for Good Housekeeping, Woman’s Day and The New Yorker magazines. * Later, at the age of 64, Marion decided to return to the academic world. At age 68 she received a master’s degree from Fairleigh Dickinson University. At age 72 she received her second master’s degree from Drew University, and three years later, at the age of 75, received her Ph.D., also from Drew University. * At age 79, she authored and published a scholarly biography entitled “Walt Whitman’s Mrs. G” which, to this day, is widely recognizes and cited as a respected authority within the Walt Whitman segment of the academic community. * Over the ensuing fourteen years, Dr. Marion Alcaro, as a Walt Whitman Fellow, presented numerous courses and lectures at various colleges, universities and literary gatherings. 2. Has the life of the author influenced her in writing the literary piece? Give examples. Yes, the life of the author influenced her. The writer being a housewife and a married affects her insights about college. She realized all of those things when she became mature enough which she did not notice before when she was in her college years. She learned to grasp a problem, analyze it...
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...Zaharat Islam ID : 082073015 Course : ENG 222 A short biography about an American poet Emily Dickinson Emily Dickinson was born on December 10, 1830, in Amherst, Massachusetts. She attended Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in South Hadley, but only for one year. Throughout her life, she seldom left her home and visitors were few. The people with whom she did come in contact, however, had an enormous impact on her poetry. She was particularly stirred by the Reverend Charles Wadsworth, whom she first met on a trip to Philadelphia. He left for the West Coast shortly after a visit to her home in 1860, and some critics believe his departure gave rise to the heartsick flow of verse from Dickinson in the years that followed. While it is certain that he was an important figure in her life, it is not clear that their relationship was romantic—she called him “my closest earthly friend.” Other possibilities for the unrequited love that was the subject of many of Dickinson’s poems include Otis P. Lord, a Massachusetts Supreme Court Judge, and Samuel Bowles, editor of the Springfield Republican. By the 1860s, Dickinson lived in almost complete isolation from the outside world, but actively maintained many correspondences and read widely. She spent a great deal of this time with her family. Her father, Edward Dickinson, was actively involved in state and national politics, serving in Congress for one term. Her brother, Austin, who attended...
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...Walter “walt” Whitman was an American poet, essayist, and journalist. He was born on May 31, 1819 in West Hills, New York. His parents were quaker’s named Walter and Louisa Van Velsor Whitman. He is the second of nine children. He was later nicknamed “walt” to distinguish him from his father. Whitman moved with his family from West Hills to Brooklyn. Whitman didn't really like his childhood as he looked back on it. At age eleven Whitman concluded formal schooling. He then started looking for employment for further income for his family. Later he became and office boy for two lawyers and later was an apprentice and printer’s devil for the weekly Long Island newspaper. There he learned about the printing press and typesetting. He once attempted...
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...“Not knowing when the dawn will come / I open every door.” (Dickinson, Fr7). Born 1830 to a Puritan New England family, her childhood was relatively normal. Her town encouraged a conservative approach to Christianity, and though she held Puritan beliefs all her life, some of that belief making its way into her poems alluding to God, she never joined the church, even after her entire family rejoined the church. This was not purely out of defiance, but that she felt she needed to be true to herself, not trusting herself to be able to give up everything for God were he to call her back. Besides religion, she would do many domestic duties that influenced the topics of her poems later in life, such as gardening, school, reading, writing, and...
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