Dorothy Wordsworth and William Wordsworth both account the same experience under different literary works. Dorothy uses the prose form while William uses the poetry form. While the experience is the same, the writing illustrates different aspects of the experience. While Dorothy’s analysis is concrete, simple, and focused only on relaying the line of events and describing the experience, William’s writing is reflective, more abstract, and writes about the experience as well as it’s long-term implications. Poetry seems to reflect our experiences in abstract and artistic contexts. It is focused on drawing the themes and beauty out of experiences, while prose is often focused on intimately describing the details of an event or experience and then summarizing the implications. William’s writing is abstract and complex while Dorothy’s is concrete and simple (and impactful because of that). Still, despite the differences, there are many similarities between the writing. They both clearly appreciate artistic, descriptive riding of nature. They similarly describe the flowers as dancing and having life of their own. One of the main differences is that poetry is often forced to compact the words into smaller amounts, thus having to be concrete and particular with the vocabulary. While Dorothy says the dandelions “reeled and danced and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the lake,” William says “Ten thousand saw I at a glance, / Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.”

Personally, I find myself more drawn to poetry. While I still enjoy prose, I find that poetry allows both writers and readers to explore the creative writing process with greater capabilities. I also think that poetry allows both writers and readers more room for personal interpretation and allows readers more opportunity to connect with the work. In my own personal experience, poetry is a more holistic artistic approach to summarizing and expressing one selves while prose is a bit more stoic and limited in it’s scope. By using literacy devices and carefully selected vocabulary, the message in poetry can be magnified over prose. Poetry can also entail performance such as in slam poetry, and I feel that poetry, while often abstract, is actually more accessible for broader audiences. That’s because it has more room for personal interpretation, typically is shorter then prose, and also incorporates other elements then just purely writing. Poetry requires more holistic creative vision, which I’ve experienced myself. In high school, I participated in competitive poetry competitions, which challenged us to not only focus on the writing aspect of literature but a holistic focus that included performative and audience perspectives.