I will never claim that I am an intelligent person or that I have a strong understanding of poetry, but I do know a bad poet from a good poet. In my own opinion the quality of a poem and a poet is not measured in their mastery of form and rhetoric but instead it is measured in their ability to cause an emotional reaction in their audiences.According to this logic, when a person hates a poem that does not mean that poet is a bad writer, it in fact means that they are a good writer. For the poet has caused an emotional response in his reader. Only when a poet causes no emotional response in the reader has the poet failed. So, a brutal critic by a reader is as good as praise, but if the audience just goes “eh” with no emotional response then the poet has failed.

This is why I feel that Whitman is not a good poet. His work may be exceptional and he may have created the most popular form of the eras to follow his but he is not a connectable poet. The first negative quality of his poetry that I find is that he pays too much attention to form. By spending all of his energy in going beyond the boundaries of the classical forms he skipped over the most important part of poetry. Though, before I continue I would like to make clear that I do not believe myself to be credited enough to pass judgement upon a poet as renowned as Whitman but I will freely share my opinion. As for the most important part of poetry, that is the soul. The emotional  connection that the poem makes with its audience. Without this a poem is useless. For if a poem cannot connect with its audience on an emotional level then it may as well be prose. Such as the poem of Whitman that our class read, the one that describes the fishermen on Long Island. It is a beautiful description of that moment in time but their is nothing to connect with. Whitman does not place his audience in the moment he describes, he shows us but he does not bring us their. Dickinson on the other hand does just that. She drags her reader kicking and screaming into the emotion tornado that is her life with every line that she writes.  Even if you hate Emily Dickinson and her style their is no choice but to experience her mood in the moment that she wrote each poem. And in my mind that is what makes a great poet, the ability to make a diverse audience feel the same way.