Journal #42

There is a lot of controversy over who people prefer to read, Walt Whitman or Emily Dickinson. Personally I would prefer to read Emily Dickinson, because she makes a lot more sense to me than Walt Whitman does. Walt Whitman was a very complicated poet, and he made every poem that he wrote have multiple meanings. Personally I prefer to sometimes have poems that I can take at face value and that are very literal, so it is a lot better for me to read Emily Dickinson. I prefer to read some of the complicated poems every once in a while, but quite often I prefer to read the poems that are simple and easy to follow. Walt Whitman tried to talk about very complex things in every single poem that he wrote, because he tried to write about Self, the every man, God, Christianity, or America in every single poem that he ever wrote. It may not have always been about all of those things, but almost every time he writes about more than one of those themes. He also writes things in a very complicated way that is quite often very hard to follow. He is very egotistical in his poems, because he says everything is him and about him and he is God and everyone else is God as well, and I do not agree with that. I do not like Whitman from what I have seen from him, and he kind of makes me mad. I much prefer Emily Dickinson, because she is a lot more simple with what she is trying to say. It is also easier, because even if she is trying to be complex, she is still a lot easier to understand than Whitman ever was. Whitman and Dickinson were not popular during their lifetimes, because many people did not agree with them or did not have their poetry. Whitman and Dickinson were both extremely popular poets after their deaths, and many people continue to read them even today.