Heavy Hitters #2: Emily Dickinson v Walt Whitman

It was really cool seeing the electric shock around the room when reading aloud the section in SOM about Whitman becoming a laundress and watching the men skinny dip.

lol I think Whitman's message to the world is at least in part "look at it, pwn3d, made u lok at my peen/vadge"

Both poets repped for their respective povs very artfully.

Dickinson, although she is exceptionally talented and I strongly admire her deft and parsimonious use of words and images, seems to me to be hopelessly mired in the no-more-shall-we-hear-thy-sweet-chirrup-alas-poor-sparrow-dear school of thought that Mark Twain parodied in Huckleberry Finn. It's like reading the poetry of a woman trapped in a coffin.

Whitman is even easier to parody than Dickinson, mainly because his poetry has so much froth in it and froth is so simple to generate in large quantities. However, I am voting for him with a clear conscience, because his body of work has much stronger bones and more complex muscles -- and if you read enough of his work you'll come to appreciate the enormous value of his underlying vision and its strength.

I understand that the feminist critic would immediately point out that ED was in some ways a woman trapped in a coffin, and therefore her poetic weakness was rooted in her lack of freedom as a woman, while, as a man, WW enjoyed supreme freedom of thought and motion. I agree with this biographical critique up to a point, but in the end I have to vote based on the body of work achieved, not the poet's ability to manuever within the accidents of circumstance.

"The Wound-Dresser".

On, on I go, (open doors of time! open hospital doors!)

The majesty of that poem.

I don't know if you meant to say this, Aimless but -

is body of work has much stronger bones and more complex muscles

- is a chauvinistic reading and appreciation, no? It's almost as if you're praising Whitman for having bigger balls or something.

Also, you're underestimating Dickinson's immense complexity. There's nothing twee about her -- not one bit. This is a woman for whom her Calvinistic faith required a ceaseless examination of her place in her garden, her room, her kitchen. Only a woman writing at that time would have lent gardening, breadmaking, and watching snakes and sparrows in the backyard a mysteriousness that yet respects these things as mundanities.

It's like reading the poetry of a woman trapped in a coffin.

I mean -- no no no no no no. She had the imagination to conceive of life trapped in that coffin AND the infinitely variegated life outside it. She never stopped observing and thinking.

No, I don't think that's a bad description ("a woman trapped in a coffin"). Formally and otherwise, her poetry has a claustrophobic feel. Just because she maybe couldn't help it given who she was doesn't mean that feeling isn't there.

I think reading Dickinson as claustrophobic is lending too much credence to the legend. The whole universe is visible in her lines.

No, not for having bigger balls, but for having a greater breadth of vision, a bigger palette, a broader canvas, more effects, and more subject matter, more things to say about more aspects of life.

I agree that ED takes the mundane and instills it with mystery, but that seems to be the whole of her art. She's a miniaturist, able to suggest much with a few, tiny strokes, but this ultimately limits her, because the thing she suggests is ultimately always the same thing. No matter where her poem begins, it generally ends in the same region, saying much the same few truths. They are big truths, but not enough to support a big body of work.

I think reading Dickinson as claustrophobic is lending too much credence to the legend.

I don't think so. I was never that interested in the biographical slant on her work. I think that claustrophobic feel can easily be found in the work itself.

I don't know why but I prefer Whitman. Very lovable poetry although I guess this is true of Dickinson. True story: I was put in a remedial science class in high school and it was so easy I finished the class two weeks early and spent some spring afternoons reading Dickinson next to a grassy hill near my school.

Looking back there is some irony in that, I think.

The Impossible Marriage

The bride disappears. After twenty minutes of searching
we discover her in the cellar, vanishing against a pillar
in her white gown and her skin's original pallor.
When we guide her back to the altar, we find the groom
in his slouch hat, open shirt, and untended beard
withdrawn to the belltower with the healthy young sexton
from whose comradeship we detach him with difficulty.
O never in all the meetinghouses and academies
of compulsory Democracy and free-thinking Calvinism
will these poets marry! -- O pale, passionate
anchoret of Amherst! O reticent kosmos of Brooklyn!

-- Donald Hall

didn't someone also write a science fiction novel about that

what a wonderful little poem!!

Glad that was posted - guess it's a bit of a hoary chestnut that you can get pretty much any 20thC U.S. poetry by mixing in different amounts of Dickinson and Whitman, but ...

Unhesitatingly Dickinson. I don't much like Whitman: if I pick out what I don't like formally, I can say the long lines, repetition as rhythm, the adjectival pile-ups, the biblical-prophetic diction. Thin on sharp images too, maybe? I think of him as just listing stuff he sees. Anyway, I guess it's not really that at bottom: he just has a sensibility or vision of the world that I don't much care for. All that vigorous, open, vatic energy just comes over like bombast and hectoring if y're not on side early.

Dickinson, though, there's lots of my favourite things: precise, elliptical, spare. Surprising: the best of the poems have nothing obvious – single unexpected overfraught words, a jump sideways from one thought to another, strange images. tbqh I don't know her work well enough to say much useful about her: I read her in short bursts every few months, never had a full-on obsession (in fact find her a bit samey if I read too much at once, obvs a flip-side of the hyper-focus mentioned upthread, a virtue in general). But her knots of anxiety + delight, apprehension of the world, I like that.

(This is HH poll 5, by the way (Yeats/Shaks, Chaucer/Milton, Stevens/Frost, Donne/Blake))

i am probably a lot more like whitman, in the way i write, and the way i think, and act, and approach the world, undisciplined, overenthusiastic, obvious, yes, hectoring, i wish i was more like dickinson, who is razor-sharp, restrained, cryptic, a master concealer.

haha

I'm Wallace Stevens.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Aha! The prevailing aethestic prevails.

yay

dang. I thought about voting whitman but ended up abstaining — sorta wish I had now, just to make it less of a bloodbath

lol ilx is full of teen goths huh?

lol

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHt4IEyYuyQ&feature=plcp

once i went to a 24-hr marathon reading of emily dickinson held at a catholic school, it was kind of like this

for all your ¿racist whitman? controversy needs:

http://wgntv.com/2013/05/18/student-deems-assignment-offensive-may-fail-class/
opera student won't sing whitman for class concert

http://whitmanarchive.org/criticism/current/encyclopedia/entry_44.html
from walt whitman: an encyclopedia

http://www.conjunctions.com/archives/c29-nm.htm
nathaniel mackey on whitman

wait this is a thing?

i dunno, i saw it going around today. there's a bit on the atlantic.

seems like not the best place to take a stand. but it also seems odd for a disagreement between a graduate student and a professor to devolve into 'you must do the work' / 'i refuse', so i wonder if it's not something more complicated / local / private.

kinda think this kid is a complete idiot tbh

i wonder if he got his F.

I am leaving this tab open on my phone so I can squint at it less deliriously tomorrow on my way to the radio station; I love a poetry thread with torturously conflicted aerosmith posts & I am very patchy with these guys. a lot of what Dickinson I've read has either been through or after being spoonfed it, regurgitated, in Anne Carson. me & my friend are reading poetry aloud to each other sometimes, & I think that's a good way to hear poems that can seem heavier or more serious to me, which is true of anything older, thoughI guess less true of these guys than some others

oh no, wait, it's Bronte in Carson

carry on

dickinson is a totally singular miracle, images about death and life at the same time, unostentatiously ultraspare, invents her own weird typography that's more useful than cummings' (or, well, someone invents it; who cares), so full of loss even when she's happy, hilarious, fractal in the sense that she sees and explains the cosmos in her bees, is w melville/twain/lincoln up on 19c literature's rushmore. whitman, i dunno. i don't like life as much as him and i wish he'd get out of my face about it. that astronomer poem enrages me. he fit right into that levi's commercial. i like the poem aero posted upthread about the live-oak/the isolated self, but we are inversions: it's WW whom i admire when i'm at my best and ED who takes me. i mean who isn't trapped in a coffin? walt whitman, probably.

I've struggled with Whitman more strenuously than with any other American poet. Bet he'd love to wrastle with me.

The only time I really loved him was reading "Out of the Cradle..." about ten years ago in a poetry class I taught.

i am probably a lot more like whitman, in the way i write, and the way i think, and act, and approach the world, undisciplined, overenthusiastic, obvious, yes, hectoring, i wish i was more like dickinson, who is razor-sharp, restrained, cryptic, a master concealer.

― max, Sunday, November 28, 2010

haha max, when we finally meet, I expect to find the razor-sharp, restrained, cryptic, master concealer you are on ILX.

it's a kind of gimmick but it almost always kills me when the dash ends a poem: simultaneously conveys an ending and an incompletion. so with something like this one--where suffering is very close and familiar but may be joy after all, where as with the french revolution it is too early to tell--it's both a chill and a relief to topple into all that spacious uncertainty in the second after she goes quiet:

They say that "Time assuages" -
Time never did assuage -
An actual suffering strengthens
As Sinews do, with age -

Time is a Test of Trouble -
But not a Remedy
If such it prove, it prove too
There was no Malady -

yall need to read ww's 'specimen days'

man dlh otm about Dickinson

or, well, someone invents it; who cares

hee

thats such a nice thing to say, al, thank you

This seems like an impossible decision to make and I don't think I could have voted.

Is it a vote for macrocosm vs microcosm, big vs small? But then both big and small are good. Perhaps Whitman never did small.

Is it a vote for close-knit form or wide open form? But then both are good. And Dickinson's type of close-knit form is miles away from Frost, or Hardy, or Larkin, to the point where she almost wouldn't fit into an anthology called 'people who use close-knit forms'.

Is it a vote, then, for how well each poet did big, or did small, how well each one did their respective job? But then Whitman is one of the best poets of 'the big' and Dickinson one of the best poets of 'the small'. They both did their jobs well.

Also it is very upsetting to read Whitman in light of Hart Crane. It makes you realise that Whitman opens a door that Hart Crane was trying to go through and he died before he could.

i think every time you read one of the items in whitman's endless lists, he's doing the small - it's part of his view of the big that this be so

this comes out particularly well in 'specimen days' because the memorandum/journal format focuses his style of rendering the small so that you can see how modest a detail merits observation and recording for him

this is probably the flip side of the magnitude of what dickinson finds in her 'small'

feels like it's more about Whitman's attempt at absolute clarity, with Dickinson's propensity for obliquity. Both of them were as enormous as universes, but Dickinson had the amazing ability to summarize the universe in wry aphorisms, whereas with Whitman, it was almost like poetry wasn't worth the effort if he couldn't be a supernova...*

*I'm full of shit, I haven't really read much of either. It's likely that many of you may feel slightly insulted that I even felt the need to point this out...

No, otm I think

Quite telling that Whitman said the only English poet he thought was big enough to fit America was 'Milton, perhaps'

Meanwhile Dickinson read lots of the Metaphysical poets, George Herbert etc IIRC

i do feel that she manages to out-ironise every poet who ever wrote

did empson ever write about her? cos he would have feasted on her lines.

i do feel that she manages to out-ironise every poet who ever wrote

I must disagree.

The Heart asks Pleasure – first –
And then – Excuse from Pain –
And then – those little Anodynes
That deaden suffering –

And then – to go to sleep –
And then – if it should be
The will of the Inquisitor
The privilege to die –

that poem is funny though. it's "true" at one level, but it's also a deliberately absurd reduction of human experience. her poems are full of these kinds of moments:

Surgeons must be careful
When they take the knife !
Underneath their fine incisions
Stirs the culprit,--Life!

i also think there is something ironic about phrases like "on her divine majority, intrude no more!" to joyfully embrace misanthropy is a kind of ironic experience, even if the sentiment is meant sincerely. the whole fantasy of emperors jostling for her attention as she closes the "valves of her attention like stone." it's fun.

What I mean is - her tone, while perfectly sincere when it's talking about a religious concept or a moral idea, is also qualified by numerous ironies. One of those being that she is aware that you, the reader are aware, that her sincerity is partly performed, and her intellectual insight through and past simple ideas and pieties is so great that she is providing several levels of silent meta-commentary on her own framing of the idea in the poem, not merely the idea itself. All this is only to add to the other obvious ironies one feels - that as a woman she shouldn't be writing or thinking this, but has a better grasp than anyone she knows. That her doubt, caution, fear and knowingness are there in the poem, unhidden, but exist with a kind of innocence which she earnestly feels and she earnestly knows has been foisted on her by virtue of her sex. Battles of knowledge, battles of form. The ironies are transcendent, because they cling to the surface of the ground, and yet are able to see all which passes all around. They express complete awareness, and the limitations of expression by one human personality.

the POLL selects its own society

dickinson really is kind of a unique poet -- i can't think of anyone else who writes quite like her.

I'm a common reader of poetry. When you say ironic, I think:

Henry was programmed for happiness.
What happened O, O bloody friends?
Hoho, heehee.

there once was a man from nantucket

What a lovely thread.

yeah i quoted that first whitman bit upthread that aerosmith quoted in a text message and got a <3

http://www.musicboxfilms.com/a-quiet-passion-movies-153.php#overview

Sight & Sounds gave it a good write-up.

“Nature is a haunted house--but Art--a house that tries to be haunted.”

Going to heaven!
I don't know when,
Pray do not ask me how,--
Indeed, I'm too astonished
To think of answering you!
Going to heaven!--
How dim it sounds!
And yet it will be done
As sure as flocks go home by night
Unto the shepherd's arm!

Perhaps you're going too!
Who knows?
If you should get there first,
Save just a little place for me
Close to the two I lost!
The smallest "robe" will fit me,
And just a bit of "crown";
For you know we do not mind our dress
When we are going home.

I'm glad I don't believe it,
For it would stop my breath,
And I'd like to look a little more
At such a curious earth!
I am glad they did believe it
Whom I have never found
Since the mighty autumn afternoon
I left them in the ground.

magnificent and terrifying

Watch the movie.

terrifying

1862:

You cannot put a Fire out --
A Thing that can ignite
Can go, itself, without a Fan --
Upon the slowest Night --

You cannot fold a Flood --
And put it in a Drawer --
Because the Winds would find it out --
And tell your Cedar Floor --

I many times thought Peace had come
When Peace was far away --
As Wrecked Men -- deem they sight the Land --
At Centre of the Sea --

And struggle slacker -- but to prove
As hopelessly as I --
How many the fictitious Shores --
Before the Harbor be --

Love those Dickinson poems. I don't think Whitman poems work so well in small doses. I guess I think Dickinson might be the better poet, but Whitman means more to me personally. I remember being on summer break during college, staying with my grandparents, not knowing many people my own age in the area, and Whitman was kind of like a companion to me. It's hokey as hell, but I used to sometimes sit out in the woods behind their house with "Leaves of Grass". Dickinson's poems are like finely-cut gems, whereas Whitman's are like big woolly sweaters. No doubt there's a lot of hocus pocus in Whitman, something I'm sure Dickinson's austere gimlet eye could have skewered deftly, but it's deeply comforting hocus pocus nonetheless.

i like it when she's ambitious:

Such are the inlets of the mind—-
His outlets-— would you see
Ascend with me the eminence
Of immortality—-

(tho prayerful as ever)

I don't think Whitman poems work so well in small doses.

dickinson does suffer in large ones i think, she can drive u crazy circling her obsessions (like the gnats around the porch light in lolita: "continuously darning the air in one spot") not to mention that one rhythm she likes so much that's practically a personal haiku.

that fire/flood/winds/floor one i posted upthread still gives me chills tho: all four elements, in conspiracy. sometimes she reminds me of the log lady

i seem to have invented a new kind of dash, above. the circle is now complete. ascend w me the eminence

This is Emily.
Emily stays inside.
She reads. She writes poetry. She writes letters. She bakes. She does a bit of bird watching. Then she writes some more.
Emily is safe from COVID-19.
Be like Emily. pic.twitter.com/4Weuc9puug

— Mathieu Duplay 🌈 🇪🇺 (@mathieu_duplay) March 16, 2020

Dickinson's poems are like finely-cut gems, whereas Whitman's are like big woolly sweaters. No doubt there's a lot of hocus pocus in Whitman, something I'm sure Dickinson's austere gimlet eye could have skewered deftly, but it's deeply comforting hocus pocus nonetheless.

― o. nate, Thursday, May 18, 2017 8:44 PM (four years ago) bookmarkflaglink

this is why i like whitman -- he celebrates mess. one of my students today said that whitman would get cancelled if he was alive today. he was too open and seemed to lack a filter, in their view.