Chapter 8 - The Emergence of Romantic Traditions

Summary

A number of poets practiced varieties of Romanticism that are quite different from the transcendentalist tradition, especially in their treatment of nature, sensuality, and myth. American Romanticism has its real beginnings in New York. The American relationship to the natural world embodied a crucial conflict between reverence for the glories of a bountiful nature and the desire to convert that bounty into cash and productive industry. Much of nineteenth-century American poetry was devoted to dramatizing the passions and intrigues of the classical past, particularly in the form of verse drama, which constitutes one of the most under examined genres in the literary history. In recent years, increasing attention has been paid to a number of female poets, including Alice, Lucy Larcom, and Lydia Sigourney. American poets, particularly southerners, often turned to the mockingbird because their own native land lacked the bird dearest to the English poetic imagination, the nightingale.