Heavy Hitters #2: Emily Dickinson v Walt Whitman

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?

man waterface we're not trying to settle a qn of objective value here, peace out

i think waterface is right that maybe we shouldn't insist that one is terrible and that there can only be one good poet in the world.

re: "could use an editor"—I was thinking (apart from the whole punctuation question) more of the monolithic inaccessibility of Dickinson's oeuvre—been reading Helen Vendler's recent selection of poems+commentaries, which helps somewhat...

... but maybe I would be better served by a volume of selected poems+letters? idk

i think the fact that some of her poems are much more cryptic than others is part of the deal with her. it helps sustain the impression that her work was a private thing that she did for herself... that we are overhearing intimate yet impossibly eloquent thoughts

guys stop ruining this thread.

ILE selects its own society -
Then shuts the door -

heh

What horseshoe said

bd., how is the vendler? i have seen it on a friends desk and thought 'that seems like an excellent book to have' but also thought 'that seems like a book i would open twice'

I bought it and returned it a few days later, only because my library carried it (I own her thin book on Stevens' short poems though lol go figure).

No problems with Dickinson.

re: Whitman. Should he have just left it at the first ed. of Leaves of Grass? Don't know enough about Whitman but is there ever a debate of a fall in quality from one ed. to the nxt?

taught Whitman recently; teaching Dickinson now. my kids are struggling with Dickinson. the other day a kid was like, "she's simple but she's not. it's confusing." that kid otm.

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

― j., Sunday, August 26, 2012 12:43 AM (1 year ago)

srsly, this helped me a bunch. you just get a real good reader who knows D to plow through a bunch in a row so they can ~hear~ it

"she's simple but she's not. it's confusing."

= great writing in one sentencce.

is there ever a debate of a fall in quality from one ed. to the nxt?

― xyzzzz__, Wednesday, March 19, 2014 2:14 PM (6 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Thanks - been reading some Whitman too and you know we should've done a Whitman vs Pessoa thread.

Actually I think Bloom linked Whitman and Pessoa together in his book Genius (along w Lorca, Hart Crane, Cernuda)

(What wd you recommend for someone getting into Pessoa?)

There's only one, right?

the other day a kid was like, "she's simple but she's not. it's confusing."

A+