A Comparison Of Walt Whitman And Emily Dickinson's Poems

Both Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson were influenced by the Romantics. Choose one of the two poets. Provide at least three ways that he or she reflects Romantic thinking in his or her writing. Then give an example from one of the works that you studied in this unit that illustrates that characteristic. Answer: Emily Dickinson is often thought about as an American romantic poet, but truth is she has such a distinct style of writing it is truly hard to classify her. But, romantic poetry is what I would classify her as because she references nature a lot, she has intuition, and most importantly she celebrates emotion. Emily Dickinson values nature very highly, as expressed in many of her works. In almost all her piece she has a reference to nature.

You learned a lot about Whitman and Dickinson’s writing styles during this unit. Although they both broke stylistic boundaries, their styles are different. Write a paragraph in which you explain one characteristic of either poet’s style. Name the characteristic, explain how it is used in the poetry, and then describe the effect that the characteristic produces. Support your answer with examples from the poems. Answer: Both Whitman and Dickinson were poets of the nineteenth century and wrote poems that were about death, nature, and immortality. The biggest difference is the structure of their poems. Walt Whitman's poems were long and complex while Emily Dickson’s were short and simply. Whitman’s writing is very descriptive. He used descriptive writing to really drag the reader into his piece of writing, which not many writers can do. Being descriptive is very helpful because people will want to read his work, because they want to be a part of the storyline. This is what sets Walter Whitman over the top as a writer. This is best descriptive writing shown is in “O captain! My Captain! By Walt Whitman. Whitman describes what is going on around him in the story, he elaborated every detail to where you feel like you are in “O captain! My captain”. Both Whitman and Dickinson's poetry were beautiful and represented their relationship with nature by expressing it into their beautiful