Thursday, February 26, 2009
Prefer Dickinson's poetry to Melville's
I liked Melville’s poems, but not as much as I like Emily Dickinson’s. The meaning behind Dickinson’s poems seem more subtle because of her carfeul use of metaphors and imagery. While Melville employs imagery as well, it just seems more obvious to me. For instance, in the poem the Protent, I instantly pictured a lynching. Even if there is a deeper meaning to this poem that I am overlooking, Melville’s word choice seems to bluntly portray this image, and I feel locked into it for the rest of the reading. Dickinson’s poetry on the otherhand includes words which have many double meanings and her metaphors often work with each other to create more than one possible meaning. Also, in the poem The Victor of Antietam, I felt like Melville’s rhyme scheme was very forced. Some of the lines, while related, did not seem like they should necessarily follow each other, and it seems as if he placed them one after the other just to enforce his rhyme scheme. For example, I thought that entering the line ‘a pall-cloth on the Seven Days fell’, seemed to introduce a different theme than what he was developing. On the other hand, I did like Melville’s use of his refrain of McClellan in this poem. It seems he used different punctuation after it at different points in the poem to either say something about or to McClellan.
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I agree with everything you said Jackie. I did enjoy the history aspect of Melville's poems, but as Mattie said before, it's the riddle that make the poem interesting. With Melville's poems there wasn't much questioning, though the irony we mentioned at the end of class today again is confusing. First he seems like an abolitionist, then he seems to sympathize with the South. But I guess all people are complicated, so Melville should be no different. And I agree again that Melville's imagery was precise in the Protent, but his other poems were very forced in rhyme and in meter. Overall I really agree with your points and can see blatant differences between Melville and Dickinson, thought I personally like Dickinson's confusing and mystifying poems.
ReplyDeleteI totally agree! Reading Melville's poetry for me was like eating an entire sleeve of saltines... not the worst thing you could do... but entirely too dry and a mostly regrettable decision. Dickinson's poetry was completely loaded. Every word, every pause and punctuation, capitalization etc... totally deliberate. And i'm not saying that Melville wasn't. His poetry just seemed to have a single(double max) meaning while Dickinson's poetry would require lots of patience and careful thought. I think because she requires so much effort on the part of her reader, that our reward is a much richer literary experience.
ReplyDeleteI must say that I agree with the fact that Dickinson's poetry has more meaning than Melville's poetry, but I must say that I perfered Melville's poetry over the poetry of Emily Dickinson. I believe that the imagery that Melville uses gets to the point of the poem better than Dickinson because of the fact that you have to dig deeper into the poem to get to the point. I believe that Melville choose to do that because he did not want his poems left to interpretation. He wrote his poems for a particular reason, like in the Portent, he wanted you to know that it was about the hanging of John Brown and the effects of that hanging. I enjoyed all of the poems we read, but I found myself gravitating more to the poetry written by Melville.
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