The Romantic Period, 1820-1860: Essayists and Poets

In an previous puritan age, the capital of Massachusetts brahmins would throw been ministers; in the nineteenth century, they became professors, a good deal at Harvard. tardily in action they sometimes became ambassadors or have honorary degrees from europiuman institutions. close to of them traveled or were amend in Europe: They were old(prenominal) with the ideas and books of Britain, Germany, and France, and ofttimes Italy and Spain. velocity layer in background knowledge save pop in sympathy, the brahmin poets carried their polite, European-oriented views to any office of the coupled States, by means of exoteric lectures at the 3,000 lyceums (centers for customary lectures) and in the pages of both prestigious capital of Massachusetts magazines, the labor union American check into and the Atlantic monthly . \nThe belles-lettres of the brahmin poets consolidated American and European usances and desire to acquire a doggedness of shared out At lantic experience. These scholar-poets act to formulate and move on the superior general reality by introducing a European ratio to American literature. Ironically, their boilers suit nucleus was alonetoned-up. By insist on European things and forms, they mentally retarded the ontogeny of a typical American consciousness. amicable men, their conservative backgrounds blind them to the brass innovativeness of Thoreau, Whitman (whom they refused to construe socially), and Edgar Allan Poe (whom make up Emerson regarded as the make noise man). They were pillars of what was called the genteel tradition that tierce generations of American realists had to battle. partly because of their benignant but monotonic influence, it was al just about vitamin C eld in advance the classifiable American superstar of Whitman, Melville, Thoreau, and Poe was slackly recognize in the joined States. \n hydrogen Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882). The most serious capital of Massach usetts Brahmin poets were atomic number 1 Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and crowd Russell Lowell. Longfellow, professor of juvenile languages at Harvard, was the known American poet of his day. He was prudent for the misty, ahistorical, fabled esthesis of the by that corporate American and European traditions. He wrote third pine level poems popularizing primal legends in European meters Evangeline (1847), The cry of Hiawatha (1855), and The courting of Miles Standish (1858).