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.

Children's poetry is barely studied and barely taught, except as an instrumental teaching tool in colleges of education. American children's poetry, like American literature more generally, took on distinctive characteristics after about 1820, as more work was written and published by Americans. The practice of addressing adults and children together in volumes of poetry spanned the whole nineteenth century, although it was slightly more common during the antebellum period. Most scholarly work on the child like qualities of women authors stresses that, although the voice seems innocent, it is really an adult voice making an adult point. The few poems that Emily Dickinson published in her lifetime appeared mostly in intergenerational venues, like the Springfield Republican, that routinely published poems for a child/adult mixed readership. After the Civil War, children's poetry became relatively less concerned with useful lessons and more concerned with sales.