After our long summer hiatus (which is not in any way to be confused with a vacation…), the Daily Dickinson poetry feed will resume on August 20, 2008. Enough daily poems are queued up to keep things rolling on a daily schedule for a good while.
Also starting on August 20: the Weekly Whitman site will do with Walt Whitman what Daily Dickinson has done with Emily Dickinson (though on a weekly rather than daily basis): regular poetry features, a photograph that captures the mood of the verse, and the occasional odd bit of news and linkage.
On the surface, no two poets are more dissimilar than Dickinson and Whitman. I think of Dickinson’s wry smile and ironic voice, against Whitman’s boisterous laugh and barbaric yawp; Whitman’s scatter shot verse against Dickinson’s precision; the tight, structured lines of Dickinson suspended between dashes, against the sprawling lines of Whitman that are too large to be contained by human pages; Whitman abroad in the world, roaming beyond the world, and Dickinson secluded in her rooms and garden while her mind travels through strange eternities.
And yet, these two poets share quite a lot as well. They are unmistakably American, making new kinds of poetry and inventing their own languages to express modern ideas. They are deeply concerned with the Soul–both tend to capitalize the word–but not so much concerned with orthodoxy. Strong personalities both, and complex; both contain, and revel in, their contradictions.
The pleasures of reading Dickinson and Whitman are certainly different; Whitman’s voice is thrilling in its cadences and in love with its loudness, while Dickinson invites us in close for whispered secrets that we may not understand until long after we’ve read her lines. But pleasure a-plenty lurks in both.
A murmur in the trees to note,
