Question

Both Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson were influenced by the Romantics. Choose one of the two poets. Provide at least three ways that he or she reflects Romantic thinking in his or her writing. Then give an example from one of the works that you studied in this unit that illustrates that characteristic.

Answer 1

Answer:

Both Walt Whitman (1819-1892) and Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) are very well known by their unique writing styles which have influenced the course of poetry writing in the whole Americas. Both of them use topics related to the subject/personal, Nature, and freedom of imagination as main themes in their poems, and all of these are Romantic inheritances.

Explanation:

Emily Dickinson, for instance, develops her poems in a very melancholy way, in which the subject is conflicted with Nature and rather stay closed to animals and flowers than near to human contact and thoughts. That is why Nature is one of the major topics in her poetry, as something present in almost all her works. Besides that, freedom of imagination is noticed by the radicalism of language use and ideas, for example, the use of "dash" in most of her poems, and/or the missing of words which can only be imagined by the reader. For instance, the poem "I'm Nobody! Who are you?" expresses all these characteristics in its lines, such as in its last stanza: "How deary - to be - Somebody! / How public - like a Frog - / To tell one's name - the livelong June - / To an admiring Bog!"

Answer 2

Academically, cutting it very broad technically, these two geniuses might  

be classed as `Romantics` but they are not typical of The Romantics.  

You might find, yes, the first answers` suggestions -   Keats, Wordsworth, some of Elisabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti  having more the flavour and adornment and/ in rhyme more typical than  either Dickinson or Whitman whose deep works reflected more the cultural, than The Romantic zeitgeist.  Dickinson, melancholically, Whitman more exuberantly...  Though if tyou like them, or one, you will enjoy the task more :)   and be more exacting I imagine.