Two Answers to the Same Question

The idea

Whitman and Dickinson were born nine years apart, never met, and between them invented the two possibilities American poetry has worked with ever since. Both were answering the same question, which the Transcendentalists had put and not solved: if the individual self is the instrument that reaches truth, what does a poem made from that self look like? Whitman's answer is expansion. He abandons meter and rhyme for a line measured by breath and phrase, holds it together with parallel grammar and repeated openings, and fills it with catalogues of trades, bodies, cities and weathers until the accumulation itself argues that nothing is to be excluded. He publishes the book himself in eighteen fifty-five with a preface claiming that the United States are themselves the greatest poem and that the common people are its source, opens the long poem by celebrating himself and insisting the reader is included in the celebration, and admits the body into American poetry at a cost to his reputation and his employment. The war changes the voice: Drum-Taps is quieter, and the Lincoln elegy mourns a president it never names, working through a lilac, a fallen star and a thrush. Dickinson's answer is compression. She takes the commonest form in her culture, the Protestant hymn stanza of eight and six, and detonates it from inside with dashes, mid-sentence capitals and rhymes that refuse to close, so that a frame everyone recognized becomes the vehicle for a mind nobody had heard. She writes about death from inside it, lets a fly interrupt the promised revelation, describes a life as a loaded gun and ends on a logical impossibility, and says plainly that the truth must be told slant or it blinds. She printed almost nothing and controlled who read her; the poems came out after her death, smoothed by editors and restored by scholars a lifetime later. One poet made the line longer than it had ever been and one made it shorter, and the exam's questions about either usually come down to that choice.