1. Walt Whitman & Emily Dickinson
Winslow Homer, The Fog Warning, 1885, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, US.
Walt Whitman & Emily Dickinson
Performer - Culture & Literature
Marina Spiazzi, Marina Tavella,
Margaret Layton © 2012

2. 1. Walt Whitman: life He was born in New York into a
working-class family in 1819.
He had little formal education.
At eleven he started to work as
an office boy and then became
a printer’s apprentice for a local
newspaper.
He became a journalist
supporting radical
democratic causes.
Walt Whitman
Performer - Culture & Literature

3. 1. Walt Whitman: life He travelled widely through his country.
He acquired a self-taught culture
including the Bible, Homer,
Dante, Shakespeare, Carlyle,
Goethe, Hegel, Emerson,
oriental religion and philosophy.
In 1855 he published the first edition of Leaves of Grass.
Nine editions followed, each containing new poems.
Walt Whitman
Performer - Culture & Literature

4. 1. Walt Whitman: life
The third one, in 1860, aroused the indignation of puritanical readers and gained Whitman a reputation for obscenity and homosexuality.
During the Civil War he visited wounded soldiers in the army hospitals.
He continued to believe in the value of democracy and technological progress.
Performer - Culture & Literature

5. 1. Walt Whitman: life
The fourth edition of Leaves of Grass (1867) contained poems on the Civil War and on the death of President Lincoln.
In 1873 he retired to Camden, New Jersey, where he was visited by admirers and disciples.
He died in 1892.
Performer - Culture & Literature

6. 2. Walt Whitman: his influence
Whitman’s popularity in Europe grew in the 1870s, especially appreciated by the Aesthetic Movement.
He influenced later poets such as Ezra Pound, Carl Sandburg, and, more recently, the Beat Generation.
He is generally regarded as the father of American poetry, as the first voice that was distinctly new and ‘American’.
Performer - Culture & Literature

7. 3. Leaves of Grass (1855) Published on 4th July 
American Independence Day
Included a preface where the
author introduced the subject
matter, the language and the
aim of his poetry.
Not a collection of poems but
a life-long poem.
Walt Whitman
Performer - Culture & Literature

8. 3. Leaves of Grass (1855) A total of nine different editions
published between 1855 and 1892.
Implied a process of development
and expansion resulting from a
transcendental sense of the unity
of all things.
All of life and experience, reality
itself, were a process, a continuing,
all-embracing flow.
Performer - Culture & Literature

9. 4. Themes of Whitman’s poetry
Optimism and romantic
faith in the dynamic future
of the American nation.
Democracy and the
‘American dream’.
The self-celebration of the
poet as a prophet of his
country.
The dignity of the individual, conceived as the unity of
body and soul.
Performer - Culture & Literature

10. 5. Song of Myself
In Song of Myself Whitman divided his being into three.
Myself  Whitman’s poetic personality
Me self  Whitman’s inner personality
My soul  An enigma, unexpected otherness
Performer - Culture & Literature

11. 5. Song of Myself Song of Myself celebrates the meeting between
The ‘I’  Whose reality is constantly questioned
The ‘you’  The ‘other’, ‘whoever you are’
Performer - Culture & Literature

12. 6. Whitman’s style Use of free verse. Long lines where rhythm is
determined by the thought or
emotion expressed.
Use of accumulation and addition.
The participle often replaces the
finite verb.
Use of dialect and common speech.
Few similes and metaphors.
Performer - Culture & Literature

13. 7. Emily Dickinson: life
She was born into a middle-class Puritan family in Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1830.
Her father, a lawyer and a politician, influenced her emotional development and religious belief.
She received her university education at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary.
Emily Dickinson
Performer - Culture & Literature

14. 7. Emily Dickinson: life She refused to declare her faith in
public, as required by the Puritan
tradition.
She interrupted her studies and
returned home.
She began a life of seclusion and
only wore white clothes as
ambiguous emblems of spiritual
marriage and singleness.
She never left her father’s house except for some walks in the garden.
Emily Dickinson
Performer - Culture & Literature

15. 7. Emily Dickinson: life She died in 1886.
Poems by Emily Dickinson appeared in 1890 published by the literary critic Thomas W. Higginson.
A complete edition of her poems appeared in 1955, edited by Thomas Johnson.
A collection of her letters was published in 1958.
Performer - Culture & Literature

16. 8. Influences on Dickinson
The Bible, Shakespeare, Milton, the Metaphysical poets.
Contemporary writers like Emily Brontë.
The Puritan tradition.
Emerson’s Transcendentalism.
The Homestead,
East Facade
Performer - Culture & Literature

17. 9. Dickinson vs. Whitman Emily Dickinson Walt Whitman
The poet of what is broken and absent.
Detached from contemporary taste, from the great events and contrasts of the age.
Poetry of isolation.
Used her poetry to challenge received certainties.
The poet of wholeness.
Deeply interested and involved in the issues of his time.
Poetry of celebration.
His task was to respond to the spirit of his country, to give voice to the common man.
Performer - Culture & Literature

18. 10. Themes in Dickinson’s poetry
Death and loss.
Love and desire.
Time.
Fear, sorrow and despair.
God.
Nature.
Man’s relation to the universe.
Performer - Culture & Literature

19. 11. The theme of death Death from the point of view of:
the person dying;
a witness.
Death  the great mystery, connected with eternity, a liberation from anxiety.
Death  the place where the human being tends to, in order to become one with the universe.
Performer - Culture & Literature

20. 12. The theme of love
Love is explored through a full range of emotions:
from ecstatic and sensual celebration
to the despair due to separation.
Love  expectation of eternity as the hope of a final spiritual union.
Performer - Culture & Literature

21. 13. The theme of nature
Different from man: a source of wonder or fear.
Can be presented:
through an objective description;
by juxtaposing the thing observed and the soul of the observer  the natural datum leads to philosophical speculation;
as a source of imagery to emphasise an abstract concept or theme.
Performer - Culture & Literature

22. 14. Dickinson’s style Poems do not have a title.
Short poems, organised in simple
quatrains.
Use of monosyllabic words.
Terms from various sources:
law, geometry, engineering.
Use of rhetorical devices such as
imperfect rhymes, assonance, alliteration,
paradox, metaphor, ellipsis and capitalisation.
Extensive use of dashes.
Performer - Culture & Literature