艾米丽和惠特曼

A contrast between Emily Dickenson and Walt Whitman
Abstract: Being the America’s great poets, Emily Dickenson and Walt Whitman are both familiar to us. It is obvious to us that they are different in their thinking, faiths and writing styles. I will make a contrast of the two poets in this paper, meanwhile explore that the living environment really has a great influence on people.
Key words: education religion writing style theme
Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, where her father was a prominent lawyer and politician and where her grandfather had established an academy and college. Being the daughter of a prominent politician, Emily had the benefit of a good education and attended the Amherst Academy. Although she was successful at college, Emily returned after only one year at the seminary in 1848 to Amherst where she began her life of seclusion.
In Emily's entire life, she took one trip to Philadelphia (due to eye problems), one to Washington, and a few trips to Boston. Other than those occasional ventures, Emily had no extended exposure to the world outside her home town. During this time, her early twenties, Emily began to write poetry seriously. Since she had her own belief in God and heaven, which was different from the views held by her peers, she refused to sign an oath to dedicate her life to Jesus Christ. Though she didn’t believe in the conventional religion of her family, she had studied Bible, and many of her poems resemble hymns in form.
Because of the unconventional form of her poems, the press refused to publish her poems, but in the 1920s, the poems were rediscovered by the literary world. Her poems are short, and most of them based on a single image or symbol. But within her little lyrics Miss Dickinson writes about some of the most important things in life. She writes about mature, mortality and immortality, love and lover, whom she either never really found or else gave up. She writes about success, which she thought she never achieved, and about failure, which she considered her constant companion. She writes of these things so brilliantly that she is now ranked as one of America’s great poets.
If Emily Dickenson is one of America’s great poets, she has to share the spotlight with Walt Whitman. Unlike Emily Dickenson, Walt Whitman was born in1819, in a poor family where his father was a carpenter and builder of houses. He was the second child of the nine children in his family, and in order to support his ever-growing family of nine children, four of whom were handicapped, Whitman had to withdrawn from public school at the age of eleven to help support the family. So he was not so high educated as Dickenson. He had done a lot of jobs to make money such as a carpenter, a printer, a journalist, and even a school teacher.
Thought Whitman stopped going to school at an early age, he was bookish and almost interested in everything. He read voraciously and was mainly self-taught, and became acquainted with Homer, Dante, Shakespeare and Scott early in life, which was superior to Dickenson, since when Dickenson began writing poetry, she didn’t know Shakespeare and classical mythology. And he knew the Bible thoroughly, and as a God-intoxicated poet, desired to inaugurate a religion uniting all of humanity in bonds of friendship.
Walt Whitman’s first book of poems was entitled “Leaves of Grass”. In which, most of the poems were written in free verse—that is, poetry without a fixed beat or regular rhyme scheme, which was invented by Whitman. He thought that the voice of democracy should not be haltered by traditional forms of verse. However, until Whitman, poetry had always had rhythm and rhyme. Most people who saw his poetry found it too weird, and many would not even consider it poetry.
So Whitman paid for it entirely by hims elf because, like Dickinson’s poems, publishers thought they were too odd to take a costly chance on.Whitman needed a boost—a way of getting his work recognized. So he sent a free copy to Ralph Waldo Emerson. He was luckier than Dickinson, because Emerson was entranced by the poems and responded with a five-page reply. It became the most famous piece of literary sponsorship in American history. Emerson’s support then caused others to rethink and revisit Whitman’s poems.
To sum up, Emily Dickenson and Walt Whitman are different in many aspects, such as family background, education level, religion and their pomes’ themes. It is the products of different living environments. Just as it mentioned above, Dickenson’s themes are about love, nature, immortality and so on, which are all based on her own experiences, while Whitman’s poems are more national. He writes about democracy, equality of things and beings and expansion of America. However, just as the saying goes, “every coin has two sides”, they also has something in common, for example, thematically, they both extolled, in their different ways, an emergent America, its expansion, its individualism and its Americanness, their poetry being part of “American Renaissance”. Technically, they both added to the lit erary independence of the new nation by breaking free of the convention of the iambic pentameter and exhibiting a freedom in form unknown before: they were pioneers in American poetry.
References: (1)赵彤. 华尔特·惠特曼:美国诗歌史上的一盏明灯[J]. 西华师范大学学报(哲学社会科学版), 2006,(06) .
(2)王光碧,杨康昀. 寻找美国精神——浅析惠特曼的《自我之歌》[J]. 安徽文学(下半月), 2010,(05) .
(3)黄修齐. 狄金森诗歌的现代感及死亡主题[J]. 福建师范大学学报(哲学社会科学版), 1994,(03) .
(4) 张涛. 艾米莉·狄金森:探寻自我灵魂的诗人[J]. 中国科教创新导刊, 2008,(17) .。