Edgar Allan Poe and Emily Dickinson, Compare and Contrast

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson and Edgar Allan Poe are two of the biggest poets in American Literature from the 1800s. They had many things in common from their writings about death and sadness, because of their unfortunate losses in life, to the fact that they were both born in Massachusetts. They were also different in many ways. They were different in the way they looked at life and wrote about their experiences from it. While it is obvious they had many differences, they also had many things in common from their lives to their styles of writing making them amazing writers.

Both Edgar Allan Poe and Emily Dickinson had many similarities and differences in their lives itself. …show more content…

Dickinson was never married, although she was definitely able to feel the emotion of love and knew she was loved. They are different in the way they write about love because Poe writes about wanting to feel loved and how he never felt as though he was loved. Dickinson’s love poems have been said to “melt even the coldest hearts.” This shows she had a very different view on love then Poe did. In many of her writings she speaks of happiness and joy but these were spontaneous writings, amongst other pieces containing emotions of anger, sorrow and death. Poe never wrote about joy because he didn’t know how to feel joy. They both wrote about love and death but interpreted it in different ways. This greatly reflects many different aspects and experiences that they both went through in their individual lives. Both are well known in their time for having an atmosphere of great macabre in their work.

Although they both had similar feelings and emotions in their writings they also were the same and different in their themes and writing styles. Dickinson was criticized for the way she wrote her poems all the time. Her use of punctuation, dashes and capitalization was much unappreciated. She often wrote her poems in song-form and in riddles. Poe was criticized also for his writing style. Even though some loved and hated him they all said his writings were unique and he was very talented. Poe’s and Dickinson’s themes were the same