It is difficult to identify two American poets more seemingly contrary in style, form, and approach than Emily Dickinson and Edgar Allan Poe. Dickinson is usually regarded as a gentle, reclusive poet, one whose posthumous work is a collection marked by subtlety and musings on a world to which she was rarely drawn. Her own iconic status, in fact, owes a great deal to this existence as a removed poet so evident in her writing. Poe also enjoys a fame dependent on the association of the poet with his work, and of an equal stature. Where, however, Dickinson is considered modest and fiercely introspective, Poe is typically viewed as a master of excess. Generally speaking, and as assessed by the public and critics, Dickinson was the shy, retiring, eccentric poet, and Edgar Allan Poe was the tortured, larger-than-life, writer. Differences in style and subject, however, cannot lessen the greater reality that Dickinson and Poe uniformly and similarly are poets of the personal soul.

Contrasting Elements

The perceptions of the poets as vastly dissimilar are certainly valid, to an extent. There is in Dickinson always a kind of genteel touch; even the brevity of most of her poems reinforces the sense that they are quick, unlikely thoughts escaping from a soul ordinarily not usually given to overt expression. In “A Book”, for example, she appears to simply be setting down an exciting novel just long enough to compose eight lines extolling the power of literature to transport. In “Crisis is a Hair”, Dickinson ventures into nearly clinical terrain, musing on the intrinsically minute nature of her title subject. Her wide array of brief, fragmentary poems adds to this impression of an objective witness to life, rather than a sensitive participant of it. More evident than even these approaches in her work is form. Dickinson is never concerned with meter or structure, and her free-form style actually imbues her short poems with that essentially “thoughtful” aspect, in the literal sense of the word.

Conversely, Edgar Allan Poe’s poems are unabashed expressions of one man’s torments and conflicts. He rarely shies away from the role of narrator; if he has not personally experienced the anguish or joy he wishes to relate, he makes it clear that the point is moot. As a man, he seems to say, this is what all experience is, and he feels it as every man must. “Alone”, for instance, is blatantly autobiographical, and in its twenty-two lines harshly bemoans his own state as a boy doomed to being apart from normal life. Poe was, ultimately, far more drawn to revealing intensely personal experience. One of his most famous poems, “Annabel Lee”, is quite literally a song of mourning. If the title heroine is not a representation of Poe’s own love, it may as well be, so intense is the personal grief expressed. Even in his “Sonnet to Science”, which unashamedly employs archaic, poetic language to address its subject, Poe cannot remove himself from his own analysis. It is not enough, that he accuses science of stripping the world of its mystery; it has also taken from him a “summer dream”. For Poe, it invariably seems that poetry is his means of expressing profoundly personal sorrow, and occasionally joy.

Moreover, no poet employed a form more opposed to Dickinson’s random, free-form style. In reading Poe, there is a sense that meter and cadence are never enough for him, for his poems are distinctly musical. He scans and inserts internal rhyme with almost mathematical precision, as in “Annabel Lee”; the poem cannot be read, in fact, without its rhythms coming to the fore. This same, intense musicality propels what is probably Poe’s most famous poem, “The Raven”, as complex internal rhyme and repetition of phrasing carries the stanzas urgently forward. As noted, Emily Dickinson is utterly unconcerned with such effects, and she even frequently discards standard punctuation, preferring the ambiguity of dashes to finish her phrases. Even the typical brevity of a Dickinson poem seems to support this style; presented as fleeting impressions, as in the two-line “Defrauded I a Butterfly”, there is literally little to no space for an observance of traditional meter or style.

Identifications and Echoes

There are, however, certain similarities between Dickinson and Poe as striking as their differences. Poets universally seek to explore themes of life, love, nature, and all the other great concerns of humanity, and these two are no exceptions. They were, essentially, solitary people, or at least deep introspection marks the work of each. If Dickinson’s poems are less grandiose, they nonetheless indicate a restlessness of spirit, or a perpetual unease, in keeping with Poe. Introspection is translated in their separate works in ways usually redolent of sadness, or loss. If Poe suffers torment from the loss of Annabel Lee, Dickinson is unable to even venture into landscapes of love, and her sorrow is equally tragic, if different. In “I Cannot Live with You”, she defiantly expresses this pain. They come to it by different roads, but Poe and Dickinson are united in a need to cry out against their states of aloneness.

Lastly, and on a more prosaic level, Dickinson and Poe are of an age and a landscape; both were 19th century writers, and each displays, albeit in ostensibly dissimilar fashions, a uniquely American viewpoint. Dickinson seems to exult in the inherent of freedom of her country, in that she often chooses to abandon traditional poetic structure. In a very real sense, she is American in that she calls her own tune as a poet. Moreover, she takes advantage of the very American freedom of the woman to explore whatever subject intrigues her. Poe, conversely, embraces meter and form nearly maniacally. He seems to adores the florid, and resurrects styles long gone before his time. Nonetheless, he infuses them with a distinctly American energy not in keeping with more passive, gentle European models. This energy, then, is also reflective of the independent approach adopted by Dickinson.

Conclusion

In the arenas examined above, as in the more expansive one of poetic spirits expressive of personal anguish and loneliness, Emily Dickinson and Edgar Allen Poe ultimately reveal that their similarities are as defining to them as their diverse methods and subjects as poets. As artists, the quiet and proper lady from Massachusetts, Dickinson, was spiritually and artistically as one with the flamboyant, musical Edgar Allan Poe. Differences in style and theme cannot lessen the greater reality that Dickinson and Poe uniformly – and similarly – are poets who write only of their experience of the personal soul.