A socio-stylistic analysis of Death in Dickinson’s and Whitman’s selected poems

Abstract

This paper attempts a socio-stylistic analysis of four well-known American poems by focusing on their treatment of death as a central theme. The poems are “Because I Could not Stop for Death,” “There’s Been A Death in the Opposite House” by Emily Dickinson, “Pensive on Her Dead Gazing,” and “Vigil Strange” by Walt Whitman. The poems are analysed for their use of grammatical stylistic devices and the extraction of general grammatical deviations. The strength of the paper lies in its integration of the aforementioned stylistic devices in a way that is consistent with the linguistic variable of gender. Therefore, a poet and a poetess were selected to compare and contrast the two poets’ styles and perspectives. Whitman’s poems employ a greater variety of stylistic devices than Dickinson’s. Dickinson employed a wide range of stylistic devices, many of which appear multiple times. While Whitman’s work frequently recycles the same devices and their variants. Examining the poems in this way lends credence to the paper’s argument that language and gender are intricately intertwined in the presentation of such a massive topic as death, which leads each gender to express death from their perspective as well as their surrounding society.