Whitman versus Dickinson - who actually shaped American poetry more?

[RogueJaguar]

Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson get credited as the twin founders of genuinely distinct American poetic voices, writing at roughly the same time but in almost completely opposite styles. Whitman's sprawling, democratic, free verse style influenced generations of poets who wanted to break from strict traditional form entirely. Dickinson's compressed, slant rhymed, deeply interior poems influenced an entirely different tradition valuing precision and psychological depth over expansive scope. Curious who people think actually had the bigger lasting influence on American poetry as a whole

Doesn't need to be a clean answer, curious how people weigh breadth of influence against depth of specific technical innovation here. Both genuinely reshaped what American poetry could actually look like

Who is your pick, and what specifically makes their influence bigger in your view. Genuinely curious how people are weighing this

[Sam]

Whitman's influence feels genuinely broader honestly, since free verse itself as a dominant mode in American poetry traces directly back to Leaves of Grass in a way that's hard to overstate. Nearly every major free verse poet since owes something directly to that specific innovation. Breadth of influence should count for a lot in this specific comparison

[NeonSpectre11]

Dickinsons influence runs deeper rather than broader though, shaping how poets approach compression, ambiguity and psychological interiority in ways that are honestly harder to trace but arguably more foundational to poetry as a craft. Depth versus breadth is genuinely the actual crux of this whole debate

[Jan79]

Democratic, expansive voice arguably matches something distinctly American about scope and ambition that Dickinson's more private work doesn't really attempt.

Different kind of Americanness in Dickinson's insular, precise interiority though, arguably just as culturally significant in its own way. Depends what you think American poetry is actually supposed to represent

[202694]

Both poets were honestly writing in near total isolation from each other and barely recognized during their own lifetimes, which makes their combined later influence even more remarkable given neither was actually famous while alive. Posthumous influence complicates any clean comparison of who shaped what more directly. Worth remembering neither one was shaping contemporaries in real time at all

[ForumGremlin]

Honestly think this comparison undersells how much poets since have drawn from both simultaneously rather than picking one lineage exclusively. Plenty of major poets cite both as genuine influences on different aspects of their own work. Might be more useful to think of them as two complementary poles rather than competitors for one single throne