Heavy Hitters #2: Emily Dickinson v Walt Whitman

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'm "wife" -- I've finished that --
That other state --
I'm Czar -- I'm "Woman" now --
It's safer so --

How odd the Girl's life looks
Behind this soft Eclipse --
I think that Earth feels so
To folks in Heaven -- now --

This being comfort -- then
That other kind -- was pain --
But why compare?
I'm "Wife"! Stop there!

i think i am going to buy the collected emily dickinson today. my volume of emily dickinson poems is old and full of semi-colons instead of dashes

affectionate, haughty, electrical,

both r kinda repetitive/coulda used an editor

I think I like Whitman more because he feels closer to contemporary language + was formative in my learning to read and appreciate longer poems

Dickinson got editors...who replaced the dashes with commas and semicolons.

t Alfred that was a joke sry

it's funny, I like dashes a lot but I really can't get worked up about that particular bit of literary infamy—the sheer frequency of punctuation Dickinson (imo) forces you to relearn the "meaning" of those particular scribbles as you read her.

(... altho I will grant that the dashes make a more striking first impression.)

*shd be "punctuation IN Dickinson" or "punctuation that Dickinson uses" or sthg

I think the dashes make a big difference, personally

No fucking shit

I've never taken to Dickinson, honestly. I'm not sure I voted here, but had I it would have been for Walt. My high school copy of Leaves was one of the 3 books I brought with me from Texas.

a lot of great writers could have 'used an editor' but i can't really understand how anyone could say that of dickinson -- her stuff is so succinct and compressed.

didn't vote in this, i don't think, but if i did it was probably for walt, just for writing like 10 different poems about lincoln's death.

and the most popular is the worst

Also as far as the poll goes, what's the point in picking one of these people they both do different things? Why choose

Who do you prefer waterface?

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.