ED and WW: Encompassing American Poetry

Reading Dickinson and Whitman as polar opposites simplifies their poetry excessively, yet it is a useful way for new readers of these two poets to map the field. Where Dickinson turns inward, Whitman turns outward; Dickinson explores compression and the miniature, Whitman expansion and grand scale; Dickinson, theology and Whitman, cosmology; Dickinson, the mind and Whitman, the body. Of course gender and regional tradition also put them at some distance--the conservative Amherst where Dickinson lived might have seemed a different nation from Whitman's increasingly urban New York.  Subsequent writers have often been influenced by both. They have sometimes felt similar needs to choose public or private stances; the kinds of audience to which each aspires also has echoes in the situations of more recent literature.