Comparing and Contrasting Edgar Allen Poe and Emily Dickinson’s Themes, Tone, and Style: Their Impact on Literature and Society

Emily Dickinson and Edgar Allan Poe are two of the most influential poets to come out of the 19^th century. Each of their styles, thematic qualities, and tone, alongside their common life struggles, pairs them together to create a gothic landscape focused on contemplating the impact of religion, life and death, and the power of self-identity. Their impacts on literature in terms of styles and content are incontestable, let alone on society.  

To start, Dickinson and Poe’s themes overlap greatly. The two of them focus much of their most famous works on themes of death. While Poe tends to write about death in a more morbid and gory way, Dickinson often tends to contemplate death in a way that focuses less on the image of her, or anyone specifically for that matter, dying. When we do get images of a specific death from Dickinson, it doesn’t tend to linger on a bodily image the way that Poe so often does. Most famously seen in her poem “Because I could not stop for Death,” we see the speaker describe scenery passing by as they ride in a carriage, but the eeriest imagery we get is through the use of words or phrases such as “quivering and Chill” and most notably “We passes the School, where Children strove” implying death passing children by as they are “At Recess” (479). Poem 479 considers ideas of death in a way that focuses more on what death means rather than the act of dying itself. By placing the poem almost entirely in standard ballad form, quatrains with an ABAB or ABCD, Dickinson is correlating death with love; She is almost writing Death a love poem here.  

In the carriage, we see that there is also the personified Immortality alongside the personified Death, which pulls in another common theme throughout much of Dickinson’s works that are tightly wound together: death and immortality. Throughout the piece, Dickinson uses images to show the progression of a lifetime by showing children representing early life, then a grain field representing middle age, and then finally “a House that seemed/ A Swelling of the Ground - / The Roof was scarcely visible” which is meant to be understood to be a graveyard – representing the end of a lifetime (479). By the end of the poem, the speaker has realized that although the carriage ride may have seemed harmless at the start due to the “kind” nature of Death, “the Setting Sun... passed [them]” by, therefore implying that the carriage has stopped moving and the speaker has come to the end of their life (479). At the end of the piece, the speaker surpasses the concepts of life and death and becomes immortal, therefore not experiencing time like the living do; the speaker says that they are unsure if “Centuries” or “shorter than a day” has passed (479). This specific poem is one of the best examples of common themes that show up in Dickinson’s works because it shows themes of death and immortality, love, and self-identity. 

When looking at Poe’s use of these similar themes, we can see how the two authors go about them in a different manner. In “The Raven” as well as The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym both are fitting examples of Poe’s commonly used themes and easily show how differently he writes about them from Dickinson. In The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym there are a multitude of scenes that show the death of a person or animal, but it tends to be in a more gothic and gory way than the way that Dickinson writes. Seeing as she does not explicitly write about the ways in which Death kills, it is quite jarring when compared to Poe’s description of the cannibalism that ensues in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. When Poe writes about death, there is not that sense of romanticization in the same sense as Dickinson. There is a darker, more secluded tone to it. This theme of isolation is seen in Narrative when the namesake of the novel, Pym is shown as a stowaway on the ship. Throughout this portion of the story, Pym is scared that Tiger, the dog, will become so hungry that he will attack and eat him.  

We see this idea of Poe using animals to describe the animalistic tendencies that human beings can and often do fall into. This fear of being eaten by an animal is then mirrored when, later in the novel, Pym kills and eats another human. “The Raven” also uses this same style of allegory by showing how something as simple as a raven repeating the same single word again and again drives the main character of the poem mad. Although some argue that Poe’s use of animals and his constant comparison of human nature is a sort of early form of environmental literature, this does not seem to be the case. The argument that Poe is using the animals he writes into poems, short stories, and his novel to put a mirror up to human existence is far more supported. The theme of questioning one's identity is clearly present throughout his novel, and he often uses animals or disguises to illustrate this inner battle.  

Each authors also have a recurring motif of religion and reflection of self across their works. Apart from the multitude of references to reflections and various situations mirroring each other, there is one clear moment in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, where we can see Poe contemplating religion and its implications. When Pym finds carvings on walls, it is a reference to Egyptian hieroglyphics or Ethiopian culture, both of which come from communities that did not follow the Western Christian G-d. The ending of the nove,l showing an enormous white humanoid creature overtaking Pym after the ocean went white, is a direct commentary on white colonization and has a clear insinuation of white savior syndrome. In Dickinson’s poem 895, we see a similar commentary on the Western Christian G-d. References to “Mass” and a “Druidic” religion are clear comparisons of pagan religions to what was, and still is, deemed acceptable by society. 

Self-reflection as a theme is clearly shown on page 124 in Narrative when Arthur appears in a disguise to scare the mutineers, gets the upper hand, and then fights them off alongside Peters and Augustus. When Arthur catches a glimpse of himself in a reflection, there is a moment when “[he] was so impressed with a sense of vague awe at [his] appearance... that [he] was seized with a violent tremor” (chapter 8). This is one of the many moments throughout the novel in which Poe writes a moment of uncertainty. He is constantly making the audience question whether what they are reading is reality or fiction.  

Towards the start of the novel, Pym describes the storyline that is about to follow as “a narrative... which, in its latter portions, will be found to include incidents of a nature so entirely out of the range of human experience, and for this reason... [he] proceed[s] in utter hopelessness of obtaining credence for all that I shall tell,” showing that from the very start of the novel, the audience is not meant to fully understand what is going on (42). The narrative’s ending is one of the clearest examples of this inconclusiveness that Poe writes. It could be argued that it is an allegory for the battle for the freedom of enslaved Black folk in the United States at the time. That it is a warning of what white supremacy could lead to? Who is the giant white human figure at the end of the novel? Is it G-d? There is a commonality with Dickinson in the sense that she also left many of her works open for interpretation, though whether purposeful or not, we cannot be sure. 

It is interesting to note the ways in which Poe and Dickinson’s styles have influenced literature both stylistically as well as content-related, especially when considering how vastly different each of their styles are to each other and from what was the norm for literature at the time. Dickinson is widely known for her use of unconventional capitalization, dashes, and peculiar vocabulary choices while Poe is more known for his often whimsical yet dark tones, specific descriptors, and gory imagery. Neither author’s style was common for their time, but both wanted to push the envelope of what was model poetry in the 19^th century. Dickinson is often considered one of the early feminist voices in literature due to her discussion of topics that were either not “proper” to bring up or taking a stance on something that was viewed as unusual. Post publication, Dickinson’s style of poetry changed the way that people think about form, and it became more popular to write less structured pieces. Although this change in style cannot be uniquely attributed to Dickinson, it cannot be contested that her popularity did not have an impact on the shift.  

Poe’s most famous works are gothic and mysterious, likely due to how strange they seemed at the time of their publication. Since becoming more mainstream, there was an uptick in detective fiction, mystery novels, horror books (and later movies). Though his works contain generally vivid imagery of scenes that are gory, his interest in corporeality, putrefaction, and cataplectic states was clearly intriguing enough to create an audience. Similarly to Dickinson, Edgar Allan Poe is considered to be one of the earliest popular authors of a genre, though a different one; that of science fiction. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was published in 1818 anonymously and is considered the first science fiction novel, and then Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym was published twenty years later. It can be assumed that Poe read Shelley’s works while he was alive and took inspiration from her, though her works would have been more popular in the United Kingdom, Poe’s would have brought science fiction directly to the doorsteps of America.  

One distinct difference between the two is their goal behind writing. Even if it was not the soul purpose, or even the primary reason, behind his publishing of his works, Poe wanted to be published enough to go through the process of doing so. Emily Dickinson, on the other hand, hated the process so much that most of her works were only published posthumously. Poe wanted his works to be known in his lifetime and even if Dickinson wanted the same, she cared more about the integrity of her poetry than being published. Apart from publication, Dickinson’s goals with her poetry were to explore her relationship with religion, death, herself, and society.  

Emily Dickinson and Edgar Allan Poe both had their life struggles and used them to write what would later become classics within the Romantic era. It’s interesting to note the similarities between their life struggles and the themes that they would often write about. Having both struggled with depression, it makes sense that they would both write about death, or Death if you will. That struggle with depression led both of them to often isolate themselves from the world, with Dickinson being known for locking herself in her room for much of the end of her life. Poe’s addiction to drugs and alcohol also seems to have pushed him into isolation especially after his wife fell ill. Both write about isolation, whether in relation to death or not, throughout their lives. They dealt with their common struggles in similar ways and created beautiful literature. Their last commonality is their lack of descendants, which feels poetic. The only thing that stays here from both are their writings and, as the G-d of literature very famously writes, “so long lives this, and this gives life to thee” (Shakespeare, Sonnet 18).