The motif of death in the poetry of Walt Witman and Emily Dickinson

Since the very beginning of the appearance of literature, the theme of the death was one of the most important ones. This theme was more prominent in the tragedies than in other literary genres. In ancient Greek, for example, death was used inevitably in odes and was always presented as an obstacle that could never be overcame. In classic tragedies, it is common that the role of death occupies the central role, as in the work of Plato, Phaedo, which narrates the death of Socrates. This tragic view was altered in the West because of Christianity, which always defended the immorality of the soul. In the Middle Ages, death was less important than the idea of salvation proclaimed by the Christian view. The Renaissance, on the contrary, was a more individualistic period and the followers of this movement saw death as an end of the individual existence. One of them, for instance, was Mitchel de Montaigne, whose famous quote “that to philosophize is to learn how to die” had great influence on the soliloquies written by Shakespeare for Hamlet. In this period, death was also seen as an association with sexual love. This love and death connection could reside in a religious guilt or, as Freud suggested, in the desire for an union with the mother. This relationship of death and love is present in important works such as Romeo and Juliet. In the Romanticism, this topic became an obsession for the writers, as we can see in the poem of Percy Shelley, Adonais, an elegy about the death of John Keats. In modern literature, the greatest representation of death is in the work The death of Ivan Ilych by Tolstoy and a short story called The dead by James Joyce.
Since colonial times to the nineteenth century, the motif of death was very present in the American literature. Scholars such as Gerald Kennedy, Wendy Simonds and Barbara Katz noted that this theme was very popular in poetry, especially in elegies about maternal grief. Examples of these poems could

Bibliography: http://www.bartleby.com/142/192.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walt_Whitman http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Dickinson Queen, Edward (2006). A Dictionary of Literary and Thematic Terms, Second Edition. Ed. Facts on File, 2nd Edition.