The most glaring similarity between the work of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson is their commitment to the immortality to their human soul, as seen in “My life closed twice before its close.” The conceit of this poem by Emily Dickinson is wrapped up in the phrase, “If Immortality unveil / A third event to me.” She doesn’t say anything very specifically (part of her commitment to telling the “slant” truth) but her comment on the mystery of eternity echoes some of what Whitman writes in “Song of Myself.” Just as Emily Dickinson says “Parting is all we know of heaven / And all we need of hell,” Whitman addresses the nature of life and death in the context of human individuality. In part three of “Song of Myself” he writes, “I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end / But I do not talk of the beginning of the end.” It would seem at first that he saying that he does not address heaven and hell as Dickinson does but think again and you’ll notice that he actually is talking of “the beginning and the end,” even if he does so by talking about not talking about it. Like Dickinson, he expresses the immortality of human individuality, shirking the notion of finite narratives of heaven and hell and other such easy extremes with which to conclude one’s thoughts.
Both poets also address love a beauty, and are fully committed to the concepts as crucial to their respective poetic projects. When Emily Dickinson writes, “I died for beauty… / When one who dies for Truth, was lain / In an adjoining room” she might as well be talking about Walt Whitman. For just as much she loves beauty, Whitman seeks a poetical truth. For example, part 30 of “Song of Myself” opens with this line: “All truths wait in all things, / They neither hasten their own delivery nor resist it.” The metaphorical conversation that Dickinson imagines goes very far to express her belief in the marriage of beauty and truth and throughout “Song of Myself” Whitman finds beauty in all things and, along with that beauty, truth.
A third similarity between these poets is their tendency to comment on the nature of poetry, their individual tasks as poets. We see this very clearly in “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant.” Dickinson’s conceit here is that “The Truth must dazzle gradually.” She believes in some amazement caused by the slow uncovering of truth, and not in a straightforward sermon of the beauty of the world. For her, uncovering the truth when it is told slant is the only way to tell the Truth that has any importance. Similarly, Whitman spends much time explaining his poetic goal in “Song of Myself.” Take the very first lines of the poem:
"I celebrate myself, and sing myself
And what I assume you shall assume
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass."
From the very beginning, this most American of poets expresses his project as both a human being and a poet (if the two can ever be really distinct). This particular example is not as direct a manifesto regarding actual writing as Dickinson’s in “Tell the Truth but tell it slant,” but it does the same work. In reading this stanza, we know that Whitman is taking a turn from the pretentiousness of his predecessors, and extolling the everyman, embracing the inner truth and beauty of the individual.
The three similarities between Whitman and Dickinson you bring up (immortality of the soul, beauty, and the nature of poetry) could be considered to all connect to each other. The wider universe human inhabit revolves around the individual and how they perceive their own world. Whitman looks around himself and sees beauty in everything. Poetry becomes a search for beauty, seeing it in things that an average person might not think of a beautiful, such as the individual’s place in the cycle of life and death. When a poet is able to understand his or her self as part of a bigger world, their soul becomes timeless which is then reflected in their writing. “Taking a turn from the pretentiousness of his predecessors,” as you use to describe Whitman. Both he and Dickinson are writing on the same topics (death, life, beauty, and poetry) but approaching it from different places.
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