A new american poetry whitman and dickinson

The two greatest American poets of the nineteenth century were so different from one another, both as artists and as personalities, that only a nation as varied in character as the United States could possibly contain them.

Walt Whitman worked with bold strokes on a broad canvas; Emily Dickinson worked with the delicacy of a miniaturist. Whitman was sociable and gregarious, a traveler; Dickinson was private and shy, content to remain in one secluded spot through all of her lifetime.

Whitman's career might be regarded as another American success story—the story of an amiable young man who drifted into middle age, working at one Job after another, never "finding himself until, at his own expense, he boldly published Leaves of Grass (1855 ). The book made him famous around the world. Dickinson's career as a poet began after her death. It is one of those ironies of history in which a writer dies unknown, only to have fame thrust upon her by succeeding generations. Whitman and Dickinson represent two distinct seams in the fabric of American poetry, one slightly uneven and the other carefully measured and stitched tight. Whitman was as extravagant with words as he was careless with repetition and self-contradiction. Aiming for the large, overall impression, he filled his pages with long lists as he strained to catalogue everything in sight. His technique is based on the cadence—the long, easy sweep of sound that echoes the Bible and the speeches of orators and preachers. This cadence is the basis for his free verse: poetry without rhyme or meter.

Dickinson, on the other hand, wrote with the precision of a diamond cutter. Meticulous in her choice of words, she aimed to evoke the feelings of things rather than simply to name them. She was always searching for the one right phrase that would fix a thought in the mind. Her technique is economical, and her neat stanzas are controlled by the demands of rhyme and the meters she found in her hymn book.

As the history of our poetry shows, both modes of expression have continued to be used by American writers. Both poets have served as models for twentieth-century poets who have been drawn to the visions they fulfilled and the techniques they mastered. Poetry as public speech written in the cadences of free verse remains a part of our literature; poetry as private observation, carefully crafted in rhyme and meter, still attracts young writers who tend to regard poems as experiences rather than as statements.

The War and Literature

IV 1861 - Confederate attacked on Fort Sumter, the opening shots of the Civil War (1862-65)

One reason is that few major American writers saw the Civil War firsthand. Emerson was in Concord during most of the war, "knitting socks and mittens for soldiers," as he wrote to his son, and "writing patriotic lectures." Thoreau, who had been a fervent abolitionist, died in 1862, and Hawthorne died two years later. Emily Dickinson seems almost to have missed the war altogether; from her peaceful room in Amherst, Massachusetts, the carnage must have seemed very far away. Of the younger generation, William Dean Howells, Henry James, and Henry Adams were abroad.

But more importantly, the literary form most appropriate for handling such strong material—the realistic novel—had not yet been fully developed in the United States. War, with its life-and-death struggles, its defeats and victories, its indifference to the fate of individuals, would for later fiction writers be a subject of central importance. But for writers of the 1860's, war was more appropriate for poetry or pamphlets.

Modern readers think that one by-product of a war is a literary account of it, largely in the form of novels by young men who had survived the war. Modern writers like Ernest Hemingway went to war intending to return with the material for novels. This was not the case with the Civil War because traditional literary forms and sensibility could not easily deal with such material. There was no place for "the real war" in the fiction of the time. The traditional romantic novel of and high adventure simply could not accept the horrifying details of the Civil War.

To those who lived through it, the war was a great tragedy. But for later writers, war confirmed a view of the world that saw all existence as a battle with an indifferent and often hostile environment. Thus, the great novel of the Civil War, The Red Badge of Courage, had to wait to be written by a man who was not born until six years after the war had ended: Stephen Crane.

One of the most enduring subjects for prose fiction has always been the exploits of larger-than-life heroes. Born of the chivalric romance, the romantic novel presents the ordinary readers with lives lived at an idealistic level.

In America, the great fiction writers of the mid-nineteenth century, Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville, shared an aversion to realism. These writers used romance not simply to entertain readers, but to reveal truths that would be hidden in a realistic story that limited itself to what actually could happen.

However, after the Civil War, a new generation of writers came of age. They were known as realists, writers who looked at "local manners" very closely and who aimed at a "very minute fidelity" to the common course of ordinary life. Their subjects were drawn from the slums of the rapidly growing cities, from the factories that were replacing farmlands. Their characters might include shop girls, poor factory workers, corrupt politicians, even prostitutes. But realism was not solely an American movement. In fact, it was well entrenched in Europe by the time it began to develop widely in the United States.