LITR 4232 American Renaissance

LITR 4232 2006 final exam

Answers to Question 3
on Dickinson and Whitman. 

copy of final exam

Lyric Comparison: Whitman and Dickinson

            The comparison of two authors seems to be a personal matter, but really, it consists of viewing one man against the latter.  Walt Whitman’s verse is free and unrestrained, and filled with references to nature and rain.  Ms. Dickinson’s more careful with each tiny line, using cleverness to exploit unexpected fine rhymes. 

            Beginning with Whitman, a reader should find an unapologetic verse, liberally unconfined.  With free verse he was able to create mythic fables of an individual born free of unnecessary class labels.  His connection to nature is foremost in his writing, which to many readers, seems quite unexciting.  In “A Noiseless Patient Spider,” he watches an arachnid spin and contemplates time, and our soul within.  There is an obscure connection between nature and the self, but this is understood through his use of language in the repetitions of itself.  Although it appears to be sameness, in “filament, filament, filament,” a reader should begin to sense motion.  This sensation is multiplied and expanded through “musing, venturing, throwing, seeking,” as Whitman builds his words into an undirected commotion. 

Unusual to this poem is an accidental assonance, which can be found in “unreeling them … speeding them” and the similar round sounds within “hold” and “soul.”  Still, his language is very casual, almost like plain speech.  Given the frankness of American identity, perhaps it is unsurprising then, how far Whitman’s style has reached.  “Surrounded, detached,” reminds a reader of the conflicted American persona, where he is part of a group, but as an individual, alone.  His untraditional style also includes non-poetic elements, such as the objective observation of the spider’s filament.  But almost always, these segments are balanced against suggestive metaphors, like the gossamer thread’s elegance.  Finally, his passages are framed by a meditative philosophy, in this case “noiseless patient” and “soul”, both of which speak subtly of his biography.

            The discussion of death is a touchy topic indeed, but Dickinson manages the morose with a touch of mirth and speed.  Her dainty dashes give her style away, but the pauses they convey give her verse a unique array.  In “There’s Been a Death in the Opposite House” her dashes are unusually sparse, but her four-line stanzas convey a typical parsing.  Her rhymes seem even, but only because her rhythm fools the ears.  What seems to be a pattern turns out to only be eye rhymes, close or near.  Like “away” and “mechanically,” or “his,” and “besides,” these verbal tricks only work with the structure the poem provides.

            Like the language she chooses, her themes can seem obscure. Oftentimes, this may make a reader feel very insecure.  However, in this particular poem her analogies are quite clear and most, if not all, of her words, mean just how they appear.  Still, while her story is simple, there is an intrusion of death, of the infinite, not too unlike a poorly timed pimple.  The interruption does not stop the story, nor is there any cause for worry.  Life continues on, perhaps with a passing thought, but without much of a hurry. 

            Each poem has a story, a style and a sound, and each poet has a voice that can readily be found.  Whitman loved love, the earth and the sky, while Dickinson contemplated life by and by.  Still, one might argue that Emily was better, her methods more sound, a treasure of poetry found.  But Whitman has his gems and spoke so plainly that to study his poetry is to recognize a certain absent vainly voice. Both contemplative and both well rehearsed, each author wrote with unquenchable, literary thirst. 

(And the title of this essay is: Lyric Comparison of Whitman and Dickinson: Wherein Kate Attempts to Incorporate an Unruly Amount of Stylistic Rhyme, While Still Addressing the Topic with Due Consideration)

[KB]

The styles of Whitman and Dickinson are as different as the way in which they lived their lives: while Whitman explored all that the world had to offer by traveling and volunteering, Dickinson spent most of her life viewing the world from afar through correspondence in letters and books.  It is easily discernable that the first poem, “A Noiseless Patient Spider,” is by Walt Whitman, and the second is by Emily Dickinson.  I can easily distinguish the two by their form: Whitman writes lengthy lines while Dickinson uses short lines and dashes.  Also, Whitman gives his poems titles – sometimes (as with this poem) identical to the first line, and sometimes abstract – and Dickinson does not give her poems a title.   However, these are just observations about the style each poet employs, and after reading the poems, I find that there are even more ways in which these poems are characteristic of the poets.

            The repetition of words is indicative of Whitman’s style, “filament, filament, filament.”  This repetition emphasizes how much filament the spider is giving out, and resonates with the reader.  If Whitman had written filament once, then the idea that the spider is pouring himself out to the speaker would not be as clearly conveyed.  Also, the poem speaks in a very plain manner, directly speaking to society and the subject of the poem at the same time.  In the second stanza, the speaker may have been thinking of a particular person, or he may be addressing the readers.  If there was a particular person that Whitman had in mind when he wrote this poem, he could have named the person, but then it would cease to be timeless as is indicative of his writing – like not naming Lilacs after Lincoln or even mentioning his name.

            Another characteristic of Whitman’s writing is his choice of the word “O.”  Much like Lincoln, Whitman uses words like this as “a way of elevating the language and giving the poem a biblical tone in secular subject matter” (EG 2001 final exam answer).  With this in mind, it opens the poem up for another interpretation: is the speaker God?  The idea that God is the speaker, and the people of society are the spiders who, “stand alone; Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,” gives an interesting twist to the poem.  After the first reading, I thought it was about two lovers that were separated, and that Whitman was escaping to nature as a way of describing what he meant.  Whitman’s poems often seem to have more than one interpretation, and this poem is no exception.

            Whitman also opens up his poem with parallelism.  The last two lines of the second stanza contain a parallelism of “till the,” which really highlights the ending of the poem.  It is left for the reader to interpret because the speaker never says what happens when the bridges form and the anchor holds and the gossamer threads connect the two.  Till all this happens, ____ (you fill in the blank).  I like the way the last line of the parallelism ties into the beginning of the poem – the person to which the speaker is talking to is like the spider: alone and reaching out to him with gossamer threads.

            Typical of Whitman’s style, this poem is written in free-verse.  Although the directions explain that this is a lyric poem, the flow that is usually apparent in a lyric poem doesn’t seem to happen in this poem.  It seems jagged as I read it because of a lack of rhyme and inconsistent metrical pattern.  But it does seem like a lyric poem, in that “a lyric is usually fairly short . . . and it usually expresses the feelings and thoughts of a single speaker in a personal and subjective fashion…” (Handout).  What I don’t find typical of Whitman’s style is the length of this poem.  Yes, Whitman does have some shorter poems, but overall, he is known for his lengthiness.  Dickinson, on the other hand, is known for her short concise lines, which are usually written in 2-couplet stanzas.

            Much like Dickinson’s life, this poem is very removed from society and the writer.  I say that the poem is removed from the writer because Dickinson is not the speaker, which you can tell from the line, “I used to when a boy.”  There are also two ways in which this poem is removed from society: the setting of the poem is a country town outside of the big city scene, and the subject of the poem is intimate and private.

            True to Dickinson’s style, this poem has a definite beginning and an open ending.  She starts off by creating a definite scene of a death in a house, and expands the circumference of the setting with each stanza.  The ideas move from directly involved, to indirectly involved.  At first, she discusses the immediate house and family in question, then about moves one step outward to the surrounding neighbors and doctor.  Next are the neighborhood children who pass by, and then the minister who probably sees the family once a week.  After that, she discusses the milliner who probably only sees a man a few times a week and a coffin guy who most people see a handful of times in their lives.  Lastly, she discusses the effect this death has on the entire town.  She starts with the source of the story and spreads out. 

            According to our handout, one of Dickinson’s popular subjects is a confrontation with death.  It is almost like she has taken a photograph of a death, and expanded on it as the death effects the different people around.  Each person, or group of people, involved in this poem are confronted with the death in the house, and each deals with it accordingly.  Another common subject is nature as a symbol of spirit.  In the line, “A window opens like a pod, abrupt, mechanically,” nature is the pod (like a pea pod), and the spirit could either be the spirit of the house, or the spirit of the dead escaping through the window.

            There is mystery in her words, which is very indicative of Dickinson’s style.  “Readers can usually expect to find simplicity in her writing, but can also expect that her words can lead them down various paths of meaning” [LL 2002 final exam answer].  In the fourth stanza, she writes: “The minister goes stiffly in/ As if the house were his.”  These two lines seem to contradict each other, and I really had to work on seeing this picture in my head.  Why would the minister enter stiffly if this were his house?  Looking up the word, I saw one definition saying, “having a strong, swift, steady force of movement.”  If this applies, then Dickinson might have meant that he felt as though he owned the house because he moved with confidence – knowing exactly what to do, where to go, and what to say.  This is an example of how Dickinson uses words to make the reader think critically about what is written.  Depending on how you interpret the line, this poem could have various meanings for readers.

            Another interesting wording that Dickinson uses in this poem is her description of the pod: “Abrupt, mechanically.”  This analogy with “pod” makes me think of nature.  It is an interesting perspective to see nature as being abrupt and mechanical; as though it has no thought… it just happens.  This choice of words makes me wonder about how Dickinson looks at the world around her.  Does she see the world as mechanical?  Is this why she wrote, to change her perspective of the world?  Surely she cannot think that life in general is just a set of motions that we all go through; otherwise, why would she have defied the normal conventions of poetry?

As we discussed in class, great poetry sounds like normal speech - it has a rhythm, but it’s not sing-songy.  This poem definitely employs that characteristic.  Like with Dickinson’s poem “I cannot live with You,” the rhythm is just a guide to help you read instead of overpowering the poem. 

Both poets show the reader that poetry exists in every aspect of daily life; however their approaches to poetry are quite different.  It seems that Whitman writes for the world to read (generations of the past, present and future), while Dickinson writes poetry for her own pleasure.  Another distinction between the two poet’s style is that Whitman tends to be lengthy and explain things in full detail, whereas Dickinson is open-ended, short, and includes only the guts of a poem – the rest is to be interpreted by the reader.  These two poets, although distinctly different, both leave the reader thinking about life in a different way. [MJ]

Lyric poetry, as described in A Handbook to Literature, is “a brief poem strongly marked by imagination, melody and emotion,” and creates a “single, unified impression.” It is the “personal expression of personal emotion” and has the quality of “ecstasy;” an intrusion into the everyday life of the infinite.  Although there are many lyric poets, a poet’s work is sometimes easily identified by the poet’s personal style.  Two such poets are Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. 

“A Noiseless Patient Spider” is clearly a Whitman creation for many reasons.  The first is his use of free verse.  His stanzas do not follow a preset pattern.  He seems to create as he goes along.  As a result, a Whitman poem is typically wordy.  In the first stanza, a typical Whitman identifier is his use of parallelism or the repetition of words or phrases to direct the reader’s attention to something.  Whitman does this when he talks about the “filament, filament, filament” that is “launched forth” from the spider.  The speaker is trying to illuminate for the reader to the notion of the spider’s endless attempts at connecting itself to something “ever unreeling” its filaments, and “ever tirelessly speeding them.” 

Another Whitman identifier is found in the second stanza.  He catalogues the actions of his “soul” by explaining that his soul is “surrounded, detached” and “ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking.” 

In contrast to Whitman’s usual style is the fact that this poem is only two stanzas long.  Whitman is noted for his lengthy, drawn out free verse.  The interesting effect this shorter poem has is that it seems to be more electric.  This poem begins with a definite beginning with the “noiseless patient spider” that “[standing] isolated,” and finishes on an open ending with the speaker searching for a way to find an “anchor” for his “soul.”  Such techniques are more often associated with Emily Dickinson’s poetry.

The second poem displayed in this essay question does not have a title making it suspect as a Dickinson poem.  The second indicator that it is a Dickinson poem is in the content matter of the piece – death.  Many of Dickinson’s poems are on the subject of death.  This is what provides her a sort of gothic notoriety.  The quatrains with slant rhymes are also very Dickinsonian, and in the third stanza, the speaker claims indicates that he is a boy.  She displays a particularly Whitman trait in the fourth and fifth stanzas when she draws on the persona of the little boy when she catalogues the list of people who enter the house. One can envision a small boy as he stands horrified retelling the list of visitors: “And he [the minister] owned all the mourners now, / And the little boys besides; / And then the milliner, and the man.”  Dickinson often uses other speakers for her poems.  Sometimes the speaker is a boy, and in one poem, the speaker is a gun. 

Another telling techniques of Dickinson is her use of synesthesia, or depiction of one sense interpreted in terms of another.  For example when the “neighbours rustle” or the “minister goes stiffly in” the reader can hear and feel the actions of the neighbours and the minister.  Likewise, the reader can feel the “numb look” of the house.  These examples provide the usual sensory imagery found in many of Dickinson’s poems.

Surprisingly, this poem employs more semi-colons than Dickinson’s trademark dashes, and the intensity of this poem is somewhat less than the intensity of most of her poems.  In other poems such as “There’s a certain Slant of light” and “Wild Nights” Dickinson creates a definite beginning and a leaves an open ending that nearly takes the reader’s breath away.  This poem does not provide the impression.  In fact, this poem is a let-down in that regard. 

As discussed in the above paragraphs, Whitman and Dickinson have their own detectable style.  While both poems fit the definition of the lyrical poem, they are undeniably Whitman and Dickinson respectively. [JO’G]

Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson are, arguably, the greatest of all American poets. However, a distinction for greatness is about the only trait that the two share. Although both write lyrical poetry, they each have a very unique style and tone. In addition, their subject matter and poetic themes are very different as well. To illustrate the diverse nature of Whitman’s and Dickinson’s poetry, one could turn an analytic eye to the poems, “A Noiseless Patient Spider,” and “There’s been a Death in the Opposite House.”

            “A Noiseless Patient Spider,” is clearly a Whitman offering; one needs only to look at the poem’s surface structure to identify the poet responsible for its construction. Whitman was unique from his American and European contemporaries in that he wrote almost exclusively in free-verse. He did not rely on typical poetic style and convention to compose his work. The poem has no set meter, no rhyme scheme, and no discernable form (other than the form that the poet assigns to it). Whitman’s use of free verse was revolutionary at the time and served to influence the evolution of American poetry.

            The tone of Whitman’s work is also very recognizable. Unlike many poets, he utilized everyday vernacular and conversational language, which served to connect the reader more intimately with the poem. The idea of utilizing common speech in his poetry exemplified Whitman’s connection to the world around him and to the emerging American society. Whitman’s choice of tone and dialectic have led many critics to condemn his poetry as being simple or too passé. However, a close examination of his work and this piece in particular, illustrates an attention to poetic detail and traditional literary devises that have come to be seen as uniquely Whitman.

            Whitman is a master of cataloguing which Webster’s Dictionary defines as: A list of names, titles, or articles arranged methodically… usually with descriptive details for each item... This technique is clearly seen in line 8 of, “A Noiseless Patient Spider”: “Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them.” The progression of musing to seeking is gradual and steady; this progression of motion is a perfect example of cataloguing. Another poetic devise that Whitman utilizes in most of his work is that of parallelism. Parallelism is a technique in which coordinate ideas have coordinate presentation. In lines 9-10, “the bridge,” “the ductile anchor,” and “the gossamer thread” are coordinating ideas; therefore they are all introduced by “till the,” which offers a unity and balance to the list.

            “A Noiseless Patient Spider” is an example of a lyrical poem. Although it is written in free verse and has no apparent rhyming pattern, it still has a melodic and musical feel to it. In addition the poem recounts an individual experience, which is a touchstone for lyrical poetry. The speaker addresses himself as “I” which intimates that the encounter is a singular experience that the audience can only share through the speaker’s presentation. The emergence of the “I” as the speaker of the poem is also a characteristic of the second piece, “There’s been a death in the opposite house.” This poem is also very melodic and recounts a singular experience but it is most definitely not by the same poet as the previous work.

            “The Opposite House” was written by Emily Dickinson. As with the Whitman poem, this work is clearly identifiable simply by reviewing its structure and style. Dickinson, unlike Whitman, wrote lyrical poetry in conventional poetic style and manner. Her poems usually have a definite rhyme scheme and are written in quatrain form. In addition, Dickinson often uses dashes to represent changes in rhythm, pauses, or beats. Such inclusions can be seen in lines 9, 10, and 26.

            The simple quatrain form in which Dickinson writes should not be confused with simplicity of thought or purpose. Her poetry is brilliantly crafted and is written (for the most part) in high poetic language which stands in stark contrast to Whitman’s more easy-going, conversational tone. Her words are deliberate and often intentionally vague and/or misleading. A tenant of Dickinsonian poetry is her ability to begin a poem with a clear a definite beginning which gives way to a ambiguous and open ending that often leaves the reader scratching his head and wondering, “What just happened here?”.

            Dickinson’s connection to traditional Romanticism can be seen in her adherence to gothic conventions. Her subject matter is often dark and depressing (usually associated with death) and, in the case of “The Opposite House” she relies on the long held Gothic standard, the haunted house. Dickinson herself was a Romantic figure who embodied the gothic ideal in both her seclusion and her appearance.

            As the American Renaissance period came to a close, two poets emerged as the cream of the crop, Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman. Together the two, writing in opposing style and on contradictory subject matter, heralded the beginning of great American poetry. Their legacy helped to define the American poetic voice and influenced future poets such as Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, and Sylvia Plath. [BW]