Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson - Compared

Both Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman were important literary figures whose influence is still seen in American literature. Although Dickinson and Whitman were both alive during the nineteenth century, they had many differences. While Dickinson lived in rural Massachusetts, Whitman spent most of his life in the city. The two poets although had different levels of experience, Whitman being a Civil War nurse and Dickinson being a recluse; yet they dealt with many of the …

…understanding of loss and failure. While Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson both explore war as a metaphor for loss and conflict, their poetic structure and imagery describe war in contrasting ways: for Whitman it is very personal, for Dickinson, hypothetical. They use many of the same literary devices but also, many of the same, and still somehow manage to get their points across to the reader and evoke emotion from many different types of people.