Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson

Poetry. Links to Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, notes from the professor. 300-­-word essay comparing and/or contrasting the poets. (Each student should provide reasons for preferring the work of one poet to the other. Contrasts in style and subject matter should be addressed.)

Whitman saw a democratic family of people which dissolved barriers of race, class, and belief system. He is seen as probably the greatest and most typically, consciously American poet; clearly the I in this selection is not autobiographical. Moreover, the poet saw people as eternal and transcendent (perhaps thanks to the beliefs of Emerson), a feeling you may note in the brief sample in your text. Whitman is renowned for not minding contradiction, which among other tendencies allies him with the Romanticist mentality.
Robert DiYanni sees the form of Song of Myself as symphonic, more like music than much poetry. Whitman often wrote in free verse (free of rhyme and metric regularity), another liberated, Romanticist tendency. He liberated subject matter for those who followed him, too, and is usually seen as having excluded nothing from his work, even the most trivial and commonplace.
Whitman celebrates. And his method of announcing celebration is to name, as he does in your featured section. You may choose to read this outloud. Enjoy. A video poetry class and written material by Alice Rabi Lichtenstein and Robert Di Yanni is a source for some of this note.

From Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass
You can find this and many other public domain books for free at Project Gutenberg.