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Model
Assignments |
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Calyssa Rosene
They’ve Got Style: A Discussion on the
Differences of Poe, Dickinson, and Whitman
According to the course website, style
in a literary definition is the manner
of expression characteristic of a particular writer, or of a literary group or
period. When one thinks of Edgar Allan Poe, we think of dark tales such as
The Raven or even
The Tell-Tale Heart, works that can
be told as a spooky story around Halloween or around a campfire late at night to
frighten some of the children. Emily Dickinson often wrote melancholy poetry
that depicted narrators experiencing bouts of sadness, depression, or even
madness. Finally, Walt Whitman wrote works that no one in his time had seen
before, and he was a pioneer of American literature as he experimented with
styles and topics that no one had yet touched. All of these writers have
differences within their personal styles; however, all of them paved the way for
writers ahead of their time and provided great examples of what a creative mind
can accomplish.
Edgar Allan Poe focused on writing primarily in formal
verse as well as writing in a lyrical verse at times. Not at all surprising, Poe
has always focused on the gothic elements that lie within romanticism, and most
of his poems surround the reader with darkness, startling sounds, and even
death. This is why his poem The City in
the Sea is quite easy to pinpoint as his work. The first line contains
“Death has reared himself a throne”, and envelopes the reader in the dark
setting about this city that has been engulfed by hell. Poe’s formal verse style
ends almost every line of the poem with a rhyme scheme, with pairs such as town
and down, to graves and waves. His musical like writing is easy to spot along
with his usual rhyme schemes. His romance narrative focuses primarily on desire
and loss. The ending of this poem, along with many others written by Poe, end
with a note of darkness as he writes “And when, amid no earthly moans, down,
down that town shall settle hence, Hell, rising from a thousand thrones, shall
do it reverence”. This darkness produces a great amount of imagery for the
reader, as through those lines we can imagine the city settling as the bottom of
a dark pit while hell surrounds it. Through his rhyme schemes, his work is
usually easy to memorize which appeals to the reader.
Walt Whitman was one
of the original great-American poets to write using free verse, discussing
topics that we see in every day life and focusing primarily on the realism of
the world versus the romanticism, although he does show elements of the romantic
within his writing. Compared to Poe, Whitman’s style is the very opposite of all
that Poe encompassed. Whitman threw out the old-time rhyme scheme that scholars
grew to be familiar with, and he took everyday objects and people and turned
them into something of beauty within his poetry which is not always a simple
task. While Poe focuses on the dark imagery of the gothic, Whitman wrote with
sexually suggestive imagery as well as used identification and inclusiveness. In
his poem When I Heard the Learn’d
Astronomer, the first four lines contain a repetitive element as the word
‘when’ begins each new line back to back. If we split the poem in half, we can
read the first four lines as the Astronomer, and the last four as Whitman, the
student. The idea of the repetitiveness of the astronomer allows the reader to
understand the dull speech of his, before we transition into the colorful
dialogue of Whitman in the second half. He writes “I wander'd off by myself, in
the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, look'd up in perfect
silence at the stars”, as the student has walked away and began his own
fascination with the stars. Alisha Blue said something that describes Walt’s
writing in perfection as she writes, “The beauty in Whitman’s writing, and
specifically this poem, portrays the very essence of his style: the need for
imperfection in art, and how to not question it, but appreciate it”. I truly
believe that was Whitman’s goal in his work, to allow the reader to stop
thinking about the idea of beauty and start appreciating what was in front of
them.
When we admire the
work of Emily Dickinson, there is a lot to be said. Most of her work accounts
the life of a sad narrator, or someone struggling through a difficult time as
she writes multiple metaphors on the idea and action of death. According to the
course website, Dickinson wrote with a formal base, but informal, or free verse
stanzas. Like Poe, she dabbled in the gothic variation of romanticism quite
often, using characteristics from the gothic such as a contrast of light and
darkness, death, and mysterious or startling sounds. She never relied on a rhyme
scheme along with Whitman, but occasionally you could see the rare rhyme in her
work. She also had a habit of leaving the endings of her work as open-ended,
which led the reader to have to analyze the work with their own thoughts and
create an ending of their own. This open-ended habit only added to Dickinson’s
mystery as a writer. In the poem I Heard
a Fly Buzz When I Died, the usage of dashes is strong as there is 13 dashes
used within the 16 lines of the work. The dashes in her poetry are often used to
signal a change in the rhythm or a pause, changing meanings with each new dash
that is issued. Her use of the gothic characteristic can be seen as she talks
about death within the first line of the poem. She writes, “I heard a fly buzz—when
I died—The stillness in the Room was like the Stillness in the air—Between
the Heaves of Storm—”. The stillness can also be perceived as the gothic
as stillness can often times be uncomfortable or eerie.
Between Poe,
Dickinson, and Whitman, I believe that Dickinson and Poe are closely related in
their writing based on their use of the gothic, but that Dickinson and Whitman
are closely related based on their personal writing style as they both refrain
from sticking to any type of rhyming scheme. However, while they have
similarities, they are all three still vastly different from one another based
on what topics they focus on. I have always associated creepy stories to the
works of Poe, while I have associated tales of struggles with mental illness to
the works of Dickinson. Much to my surprise, I never encountered much work by
Whitman until the beginning of this course and seeing as he is revered as one of
the greatest American poets, I feel as though his work should be sampled through
literature courses more frequently.
It is important to
understand the differences of each poet, not only to understand the depths of
their work, but to appreciate it. It is also important to see the similarities
between works, because if you can understand the depth of the metaphors from
Dickinson, you can decipher the usage of them in the work of Whitman or Poe. It
isn’t a matter of choosing which sub-genre you enjoy more. For example, I highly
enjoy the gothic and everything it is composed of, but I can see why Whitman is
put on such a literature pedestal. There are so many points of interest that one
needs to discover within each author to see the importance of each piece of
work. When you look at Poe, Dickinson, and Whitman in this order, you can see
the transition from a strict and rhyming formal verse, onto a more lenient free
verse with formal tendencies, and finally stopping at the usage of a pure form
of free verse. From the naked eye, you may not be able to locate many
differences or similarities when you are plainly looking at the work of each
author, but once you look up close and take the time to analyze them, you will
find that many work in romanticism or the romantic period are intertwine, and it
is important to see that.
