Modern American Poetry

Modern American Poetry

The end of the Civil War marked the end of a literary epoch. The New England group, containing (if Poe could be added) all the great names of the ante-bellum period, began to disintegrate. The poets had outsung themselves; it was a time of surrender and swansongs. Unable to respond to the new forces of political nationalism and industrial reconstruction, the Brahmins (that famous group of intellectuals who dominated literary America) withdrew into their libraries. Poets like Longfellow, Bryant, Taylor, turned their eyes away from the native scene, rhapsodized endlessly about Europe, echoed the parlor poetry of England, or left creative writing altogether and occupied themselves with translations. They had been borne into an era in which they had no part, writes Fred Lewis Pattee (A History of American Literature Since 1870), and they contented themselves with rechoings of the old music. ... Within a single period of six years, from 1867 to 1872, there appeared Longfellows Divina Commedia, C. E. Nortons Vita Nuova, T. W. Parsons Inferno, William Cullen Bryants Iliad and Odyssey, and Bayard Taylors Faust. Suddenly the break came. America developed a national xviiiconsciousness; the West discovered itself, and the East discovered the West. Grudgingly at first, the aristocratic leaders made way for a new expression; crude, jangling, vigorously democratic. The old order was changing with a vengeance. All the preceding writerspoets like Emerson, Thoreau, Lowell, Longfellow, Holmeswere not only products of the New England colleges, but typically Boston gentlemen of the early Renaissance. To them the new men must have seemed like a regiment recruited from the ranks of vulgarity. Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Bret Harte, John Hay, Joaquin Miller, Joel Chandler Harris, James Whitcomb Rileythese were men who had graduated from the farm, the frontier, the mine, the pilot-house, the printers shop! For a while, the movement seemed of little consequence; the impact of Whitman and the Westerners was averted. The poets of the transition, with a deliberate art, ignored the surge of a spontaneous national expression. They were even successful in holding it back. But it was gathering force. The nineteenth century, up to its last quarter, had been a period of new vistas and revolts: a period of protest and iconoclasmthe era of Shelley and Byron, the prophets of liberty, equality and fraternity. It left no immediate heirs. In England, its successors by default were the lesser Victorians.[1] In America, the intensity xixand power of men like Emerson and Whittier gave way to the pale romanticism and polite banter of the transition, or, what might even more fittingly be called the post-mortem poets. For these interim lyrists were frankly the singers of reaction, reminiscently digging among the bones of a long-dead past. They burrowed and borrowed, half archaeologists, half artisans; impelled not so much by the need of creating poetry as the desire to write it. ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 58992
Author: Untermeyer, Louis
Release Date: Mar 1, 2019
Format: eBook
Language: English

Contributors

Editor: Untermeyer, Louis, 1885-1977