How funny that the two major American poets of the 19th century are such contrasts: Whitman, the quintessentially "manly man", a massive, vibrant spirit whose work was to encompass the spirit of the Americas and who was to be the poet laureate of the new nation that Emerson demanded, and Dickinson, the demure, secluded woman of no great aspirations or designs. Fitting that they differed so greatly in style, as well. Whitman preferred an energetic free-verse, a structureless, malleable form that allowed him to shift and swerve and mold his style at a moment's notice, allowing him the freedom to write as he needed. His poems were as massive as the themes he was tackling (Leaves of Grass being a book-length work). Dickinson, by contrast, preferred a style that was tightly structured, pithy and delivered in tidbits; one would be hard-pressed to find any poems of hers that go beyond a few hundred lines.
As is fitting, they were focused on very different themes. There was nothing that held Dickinson's interests more than death, than obscurity; Emerson celebrated nothing besides life, extending that word to encompass everything that happened to him and everything that could happen to him. There could be no better representative American poets, then, than these two, who between them attempted to encompass everything that poetry could. In some ways, this opposition, these vivid contrasts, do not so much separate them as combine them. For between the two of them, they have established American poetry in a way that no one before them or no one since has, and so are BOTH the quintessential American poet that Emerson called for. Their interests were never the maudlin sentimentality or enlightened morality that so enraptured their British forerunners, but the pleasures and fears of the material and the mortal.
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