LITR 4232 American Renaissance 2012 final exam—Answers to Question B5 "compare and contrast poems by Whitman and Dickinson" final exam assignment

Andy Feith

Emily Dickinson and the Good Grey Poet

          Emily Dickinson’s style of poetry is tightly structured into four-line stanzas, whereas Whitman’s free verse has an overflowing kind of enthusiasm. This is the most obvious way to distinguish the authors of the two sample poems; “A Noiseless Patient Spider” is Whitman’s, and the untitled poem is Dickinson’s. I contrast Whitman’s enthusiastic free verse to Dickinson’s control and structure, but this ten-line snippet of a poem does follow certain rules of symmetry. Both stanzas are comparable in terms of the lengths of their various lines; i.e., the first line of each stanza is short and introduces the main character of that stanza (first the spider, then “O my soul”); the following four lines are a bit longer. Another way of describing this contrast between the two poets’ styles is to note that Dickinson writes in the tradition of lyric poetry, while Whitman pioneered free verse, making his own rules as he went along. “The Noiseless Patient Spider” and “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” are relatively tightly structured for Whitman; longer poems of his, like “I Sing the Body Electric,” consist of extremely long catalogs or lists, just one item after another. Whitman’s self-consciously stubborn insistence is that all of these little things are worthy of notice, even celebration.

          “A Noiseless Patient Spider” addresses the theme the Whitman style sheet calls “shifting relations between self and other, soul and nature.” The spider is considered first and keenly observed, with an appreciation for the delicate labor of making the strands of a web. Whitman then turns to address his own soul. Where the spider is “on a promontory… isolated” in the midst of “the vacant vast surrounding,” Whitman’s soul is “surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space.” Both creatures are projecting themselves outward in some way, trying to make contact with something solid. There is a typical grandiosity about Whitman’s description of himself here. Dickinson too likes to address lofty or profound topics, but she is much less likely than Whitman to focus so much attention on herself in her poems.

          This is true of her untitled poem that begins with “There’s been a death in the opposite house”. She has the speaker of the poem refer to himself in the poem’s third stanza (“They wonder if It died on that,—/I used to when a boy”), but the poem as a whole is a description of an external event, the sights and sounds of a “country town” when there has been a death. One could imagine the speaker of the poem composing these lines from a window looking out; in fact this rhetorical position is typical of Dickinson, and death is one of her favorite topics. What is unusual about this poem is its everyday-ness. Dickinson simply writes what she sees in an unadorned fashion. In a poem like “Dare you see a Soul at the White Heat”, by contrast, or even “I love to see it lap the miles”, she enters the realm of the metaphysical and describes visions appropriate to biblical prophets or dreams. The “Forge” and the “Blacksmith” who superheats and shapes the molten “Soul” are an entirely different subject matter than the “minister” and “milliner” of Dickinson’s “country town.” There is an exaltation and intensity there that is absent in “There’s been a death in the opposite house.”