WALT WHITMAN AND EMILY DICKINSON: THE POET OF DEMOCRACY, AND THE PRISONER OF THOUGHTFUL INFINITY

Abstract

The United States, Emerson (1803-1882) wrote in 1844, is ready for the appearance of its great poets. When they arrive, he predicted, they will come with a „new thought”, a „whole new experience to unfold” – an American thought, an American experience. And they will have to break away from European forms and seek American techniques, because really great poetry has „a thought so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing.” Two people, indeed, were alive at the time, who would emerge as the artists Emerson was waiting for. A decade after Emerson wrote, Walt Whitman (1819-1892) published his Leaves of Grass, creating with a single book a poetic language unmistakably American. And Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) was beginning to write the verses which would ultimately establish her as a major American poet. Whitman sees himself as a representative democratic person, as a microcosm of all that is America, so in offering his Leaves of Grass he is offering himself, and he is offering America as well. Of course, Whitman wrote before the United States became the world–s superpower, before the two world wars, before the age of electronics and space travel, before all the marvels and all the horrors of the twentieth century, and the beginning of the twenty-first. But Whitman–s identity, his omnipresent „I” and his archetypal American personality, captures something permanent, unchanging about the United States. Leaves of Grass encompasses and integrates the concerns of also other American Romantics – the individualism of Emerson, the spiritual intensity of Thoreau, the head and heart emphasis of Hawthorne, the balanced survival of Melville, even some of the feminist vision of Margaret Fuller. It reconciles the transcendentalists– optimistic hopefulness with Hawthorne–s and Melville–s power of blackness. And it is true that Whitman also accepts. He accepts what he finds in himself and what he finds in America. He captures in his poems the largeness of the American continent and its landscape, the variety of people who live there, the range of experiences these people have, the cultures, religions, passions, and interests which shape them. Walt Whitman looked outward at all of America. He sang his songs loudly and clearly for the whole country. At the same time, however, in a small New England village, Emily Dickinson looked inward at her own experience. She wrote quietly for herself and for a very few close friends. Emily Dickinson is the embodiment of the nineteenth-century American individualism. Both what she says and how she says it is so purely her own, so very much the result of her selfreliance, her independent personal and artistic judgment. In finding her way in life and in poetry she follows neither traditions nor religions. She is, of course, traditional in her use of very old poetic techniques. And she is religious in that she cares deeply about the often painful question of what life is all about, what it really means. But she is both of these only in the larger context of being herself. She puts all that is the past and all that is the opinion or belief of other people into the framework of her own personal experience and her articulation of that experience in her poetry. As much as any of the Romantic writers, she lives by Emerson–s contention that „nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.” Like all the major Romantic writers, Emily Dickinson transforms, through the brilliance of her perception and her craftsmanship, life into art. The freshness and the power that Emerson and Thoreau, Hawthorne and Melville brought to the creation of prose, she and Walt Whitman brought to the creation of poetry.