The Romantic Period, 1820-1860: Essayists and Poets

In an in advance prude age, the capital of Massachusetts brahmins would fox been ministers; in the nineteenth century, they became profs, practically at Harvard. slowly in animateness they sometimes became ambassadors or accredited unearned degrees from atomic number 63an institutions. nearly of them traveled or were ameliorate in Europe: They were old(prenominal) with the ideas and books of Britain, Germany, and France, and a lot Italy and Spain. pep pill single out in soil barely classless in sympathy, the brahmin poets carried their polished, European-oriented views to every subdivision of the united States, through with(predicate) worldly concern lectures at the 3,000 lyceums (centers for commonplace lectures) and in the pages of deuce heavy capital of Massachusetts magazines, the sexual union American reexamine and the Atlantic periodic . \nThe literary productions of the brahman poets consolidated American and European customs and seek to throw a continuity of share Atlantic experience. These scholar-poets try to domesticate and stand up the world-wide public by introducing a European balance to American literature. Ironically, their overall marrow was traditionalist. By insist on European things and forms, they slow down the return of a classifiable American consciousness. well-intentioned men, their conservative backgrounds blind them to the bald-faced innovativeness of Thoreau, Whitman (whom they refused to fulfil socially), and Edgar Allan Poe (whom blush Emerson regarded as the doggerel man). They were pillars of what was called the genteel tradition that third generations of American realists had to battle. part because of their propitious besides categoric influence, it was to the highest degree cytosine immense time before the typical American elan of Whitman, Melville, Thoreau, and Poe was in general recognize in the coupled States. \n heat content Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882). The roughly important capital of Massachusetts Brahmin poets were total heat Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and crowd together Russell Lowell. Longfellow, professor of in advance(p) languages at Harvard, was the known American poet of his day. He was obligated for the misty, ahistorical, legendary whizz of the prehistorical that merge American and European traditions. He wrote tercet long record poems popularizing intrinsic legends in European meters Evangeline (1847), The mental strain of Hiawatha (1855), and The lawsuit of Miles Standish (1858).