Emily Dickinson over Whitman

So far my class and I have only read and gone over Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson and out of the two I personally enjoy Emily’s work more than Walt’s. Even though Whitman’s poem are more up beat and seem to have more of a positive voice to it, Emily seems to have this air deepness in her poems and I like that. Also she seems to enjoy life and the beauty it has. In some of her poems she talks about how she comes across god or experiences a divine feeling out in nature like in, “Winter Afternoons.” This poem describes the beauty in the mountains of the Himalayas and that no matter what we do we can’t affect this.

She’s very deep in all of her poems; it doesn’t matter what she talks about wether it be a divine experience to experiencing love or even sorrow. Some people say she is a very depressed poet but what I see is the longing for love and affection like in her poem “If you were coming in the Fall.” I see how people could get the idea that she is all doom and gloom because at first glance I thought she was talking about woe is me to be alone and have no one here with me. After reading through it several times I started to get more of an understanding of it and what it truly was saying. What she was saying was if she knew when the one she loves was coming to visit she would wait for him, counting down the days/months/years it would take for him to arrive but since she doesn’t know the waiting is tearing her up inside. She describes what true love is in a way by saying no matter how long it takes I will wait for you to come. To me Emily Dickinson’s work is all about perception and the outlook of the person who is reading it. Dickinson is not all about sorrow and death, even though she mentions it a lot in her poems, she is the one who is just thinking outside the box and talking about real life issues or events in another manner.