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Kristina Koontz
Similarly, Different: Comparing
the Style and Content between Poe, Whitman, and Dickinson
As someone who has recently hopped into
the bandwagon of poetry, and who has studied poetry before that ever happened,
one thing with poets is clear: every poet, like any artist, has a certain style
and a certain muse (or muses) that they use for their content. Edgar Allan Poe,
Emily Dickinson, and Walt Whitman wrote in vastly different styles with
different contents, but all existed in roughly the same period in history, and
the ideas of that period bleed through into their works in different ways that
make each author identifiable.
Poe is always easy for me to identify for two reasons.
First and foremost is his love of formal verse. In the poem “The City in the
Sea” the rhymed lines follow an “a/a/b/b” pattern right up until the last four
lines where it switches to “a/b/a/b” like he’s written it as a sonnet rather
than just a formal verse poem. All his poems follow the formal verse style: “The
Raven” “Anabel Lee” “Sonnet to Science”. Basically, if you can name a Poe poem
there is a near-certainty it will be written in formal verse. But anyone can
write in formal verse. It’s his content that makes him identifiable. The man was
an absolute gothic romantic drama king. He takes the whole notion of gothic and
romanticism up to ten in his works and never lets it go below that. In the poem
“The City in the Sea” Poe paints a picture of a town fallen to ruin, with Death
lording over it. “Lo! Death has reared himself a throne/In a strange city lying
alone,” so that’s a Poe red-flag if there ever was one. He takes the gothic
romanticism up to ten when he describes the town being swallowed by a red
sea-wave and dragged down into Hell. “Down, down that town shall settle
hence,/Hell, rising from a thousand thrones,/Shall do it reverence.” This is
classic Poe where he sticks to his gothic mainstay and yet he pulls a strange
contradiction here: he makes it seem that Hell will do the town “reverence”
rather than harm it. He pulls this kind of weird “romanticizing of Hell” here
that is quintessentially Edgar Allan Poe. Other writers simply don’t do this.
Dickinson, like Poe, also uses formal verse when writing
poetry, though hers is less rigid, and it isn’t always a certainty she will
employ it. In her poem “I heard a fly buzz when I died” there doesn’t seem to be
any rhyme scheme save for two lines “Between the light—and me –” and “I could
not see to see—” in an “a/b/a/b” pattern. Nothing else in the poem rhymes. But
with Dickinson, there’s always a tell-tale way of knowing it’s one of hers: her
weird obsession with dashes. They’re everywhere in her poem, and there doesn’t
seem to be any pattern to why or when or where she uses them either, but they
provide a segmented appearance that lets the reader know this is Dickinson. Her
poems are also usually very short – this one is only sixteen lines long. Her
content further acts as a hint. Though she has the same focus on death that Poe
had, Dickinson is often much vaguer in her poems. Poe is very concise and clear
in his images. Dickinson leaves open the interpretation of what images she does
give. My main response with her is usually “Oh, this is nice but…what the heck
is going on?” With Poe you can pretty much understand what’s going on through
his concise images and events, couched as it might be in symbolism. Dickinson,
in contrast, is happier letting the reader interpret rather than spelling it out
for them. She doesn’t romanticize as much as Poe either. There’s a little bit of
it in this poem, with lines like “For that last Onset—when the King/Be
witnessed—in the Room—” but otherwise it’s much more realistic than something
Poe would write. A fly in a room during a funeral is not romantic. Flies are
tiny obnoxious buzzy things that not even Poe would have been able to
romanticize.
Whitman is thus left the outlier in this triad. He does
not employ the formal verse of Poe nor the vagueness one might find with
Dickinson. As a free verse poet, he is not confined by a rhyme scheme or rhythm
restriction which enables for him to have an altogether different “feel” than
Poe or Dickinson. “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” is a good example of
this. Whitman’s work is more like reading lines of prose but in a “poetic”
manner, kind of like how you would read Shakespeare – just minus the iambic
pentameter. His subject is also markedly different. It’s not gothic like the
previous two poets. Whitman has a greater focus on the natural world and
romanticizing that. The short poem is about the narrator growing disillusioned
with an astronomer’s lecture and became “tired and sick”; “wander’d off”
outside, and “look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.” Whitman, like a lot of
romantic poets, disliked the scientific-y outlook on the world because it
supposedly removed the wonder from it (coincidentally this is also an opinion
Poe had). The night isn’t just the night; it’s “mystical”. There is magic and
mystery to the night that, in Whitman’s eyes, science removes. By going outside
and admiring the stars as they are he seems to follow Emerson’s advice from
Nature as well: “if a man should be
alone, let him look at the stars.”
Content and style can tell a lot about the person who
created the piece. Poe and Dickinson are one of the easiest to recognize and
some of that is no doubt in part to them being taught a little more frequently
than Whitman, and that seems to be because middle and high school teachers teach
formal verse more frequently, at least from my experience. Whitman isn’t quite
so easy to recognize because free verse is just that – free verse – and
free-verse isn’t confined to a format. Even coming from the same poet there can
be wide variations in free verse poetry, and I speak from experience in that
regard. Whitman kind of requires a reader to be familiar with him beforehand
before you can start recognizing his work as easily.
