Poetic Development in the U.S.: Realism

"Realism" is the second installment of a series that focuses on poetic development in the United States.  The first installment is a superficial examination of romanticism.

Preface

One aspect of history fundamental to the comprehension of Western literature is the idea that regardless how novel a cultural development may seem, it is not discontinuous from the aggregate intellectual and artistic achievements that precede it.  Even Karl Marx's, Charles Darwin's, and Friedrich Nietzsche's great imaginative leaps must be viewed as a part of the intellectual environment in which their theories were born.  Such a sense of continuity leads to two important conclusions.  First, a sympathetic understanding of the past permits a more complete appreciation of current achievements.  Second, the past, in contrast with being a repository, is the root of an organic process that continuously nourishes present and future achievements.  The continuity of Western literature is best illustrated by the way in which writers continue to draw from the past to create original works.  To demonstrate the creative continuity, we will attend to several representative figures, each recognizably a realist, their realism rooted in and continuous with the achievements of their predecessors.

Cultural Background

After the Civil War (1861-- 1865), the United States experienced two important shifts in the distribution of its population.  First, many veterans, freed slaves, cattlemen, farmers, and immigrants moved to the West--joining earlier settlers, Native Americans, and the U. S. Cavalry.  From the mixture emerged the legend of the Old West that engendered decades of western fiction and film.  By the end of the century, however, the West was no longer wild.  Second, 8 to 10 million Americans moved from rural to urban areas as the United States changed from an agrarian to an industrial nation.  Whereas 20 percent of Americans lived in cities in 1860, over 40 percent lived in cities in 1900.  In the industrial centers of the East, the high number of native and immigrant workers led to the formation of something new: a working class in the European sense.  Meanwhile, the operations of the robber barons, after gaining headway during Ulysses S. Grant's administration (1869 -- 1877), grew in magnitude.  The gap between rich and poor widened, working conditions were mostly unregulated, and a series of panic and depression, beginning in 1873, increased the burdens and the discontent of the poor.

Although the United States had become the world's richest nation and greatest industrial power by 1900, serious questions remained about the quality of American life.  In 1890, the richest 9 percent of the population possessed 71 percent of all wealth.  Unsafe working conditions, strict work discipline, and periodic cycles of high unemployment led workers to organize.  Efforts to improve living conditions in the cities included attempts to eliminate political corruption.  Reform-minded governors introduced elements of direct democracy, such as primary elections; many state governments enacted economic and social legislation, such as laws regulating wages, hours, and working conditions, especially for women and children.  National progressivism was evident in the administrations of both Theodore Roosevelt (1901 -- 1909) and Woodrow Wilson (1913 -- 1921).  Under Roosevelt a Meat Inspection Act and a Pure Food and Drug Act provided limited federal regulation of corrupt industrial practices.  Wilson was responsible for the creation of a graduated federal income tax and a Federal Reserve System, which permitted the federal government to play a role in economic decisions formerly made by bankers.

From Romanticism to Realism

The wrenching actualities of the Civil War and the changing demographics from industrialization necessitated a change in the perspectives of American poets, and they steadily moved from a romantic aesthetics toward a realistic treatment of subject and form.  Their realistic stance marked their works as products of a different world from that of the romantics.  As the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth, realistic exploration became naturalistic examination that recaptured some of the symbolic effect of Edgar Allen Poe.

The older voices did not remain silent.  Poe, who had died in 1849, continued to grow in popularity; Ralph Waldo Emerson, still alive and productive, continued to exert influence.  Three romantic poets--Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Sidney Lanier--were also realists.  Their poems contain characteristics of both movements.  The source of Whitman's vision of America was the idealism of the past: the individualism of Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, the rise of the common man during Old Hickory's presidency (1829 -- 1837), the intuitional faith of Emerson, and the humanitarianism of transcendentalism.  But Whitman expressed such idealism via a revolutionary form.  His interest in psychology and science led to the transfiguration of disagreeable subjects, and no other realist explored more keenly than he the ordinary object or the lowly person.  Emily Dickinson was a product of colonial and puritanical Amherst, where she inherited the rhythm of balladry, the form of Protestant hymns, and the tradition of romantic nature poetry.  But the realistic details, the psychological explorations, and the affective expression are the reasons later poets regarded her work as modern.  Sidney Lanier, a Georgia regionalist, infused his romantic nature poetry with the southern economics of corn and cotton, with incisive criticism of the abuses of the industrial and mercantile systems, and with a realistic sense of the complexities of individual responsibility.

Lanier

Sidney Lanier's poetry represents the end of romanticism in the United States.  Lanier pursued a career in both music and literature after service in the Confederate army and confinement in the federal prison at Point Lookout, Maryland, where he was infected with the tubercle bacillus.  His first published work was a novel, Tiger-Lilies (1867), the basis of which was his experience in the Civil War.  Though Lanier constantly devoted himself to poetic composition, it was not until the opportune publication of "Corn" and "The Symphony" in Lippincott's in 1875 that he received recognition.  The former concerns the plight of penniless Southern farmers; the latter condemns the negative effects of commercialism.  In his cantata, The Centennial Meditation of Columbia, 1776--1876, he attempts to resolve the rhythms of music and poetry.  Although the cantata was received well at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, when it was published without Dudley Buck's music, critics harshly judged it.  Like Whitman, Lanier discovered that the majority of readers, accustomed to traditional meters, were deaf to the rhythms he introduced in such poems as "The Symphony" and "The Marshes of Glynn" (1878).

"The Marshes of Glynn" is an orchestral improvisation.  The basis of the time, or meter, is the isochronal phrase in which the initial syllable of each line bears a stress.  Lanier proposed in The Science of English Verse (1880) that the distance between stressed syllables is constant regardless of the number of syllables between them.  The reader either will lengthen or shorten the unstressed syllables between stresses to keep the intervals isochronous--that is, equal in duration.

     Affable live-oak, leaning low,--
     Thus--with your favor--soft, with a reverent hand,
     (Not lightly touching your person, Lord of the land!)
     Bending your beauty aside, with a step I stand
     On the firm-packed sand,
                                                                  Free
     By a world of marsh that borders a world of sea.
          Sinuous southward and sinuous northward the shimmering band
     Of the sand-beach fastens the fringe of the marsh to the folds
          of the land.
     Inward and outward to northward and southward the beach-lines
          linger and curl
     As a silver-wrought garment that clings to and follows the firm
          sweet limbs of a girl.
     Vanishing, swerving, evermore curving again into sight,
     Softly the sand-beach wavers away to a dim gray looping of light.
     And what if behind me to westward the wall of the woods stand high?
     The world lies east: how ample, the marsh and the sea and the sky!
     A league and a league of marsh-grass, waist-high, broad in the blade,
     Green, and all of a height, and unflecked with a light or a shade,
     Stretch leisurely off, in a pleasant plain,
     to the terminal blue of the main.

     Oh, what is abroad in the marsh and the terminal sea?
          Somehow my soul seems suddenly free
     From the weighing of fate and the sad discussion of sin,
     By the length and the breadth and the sweep of the marshes
          of Glynn.¹  (42 -- 64)

Although the musicality of his language--through alliteration, assonance, end rhyme, and internal rhyme--is intense, the metaphorical descriptions of the forests and marshes in Glynn County, which is in the southeastern corner of Georgia, and of the spiritual mood produced by those forests and marshes lighten or soften the timbre.  "The Marshes of Glynn" and "Sunrise" celebrate the transition of the individual from a material to a spiritual state.  "Sunrise," which Lanier composed on his deathbed, symbolizes the end of the romantic movement in the United States.

Realism (1870 -- 1936)

From the end of the Civil War until the late 1880's, poets struggling to find their voices were entangled in the idealism of the previous period and the expectations of a new age.  As interim poets they combined the qualities of romanticism and realism.  They depicted in dialects common people, identified those subjects with their surroundings, and achieved some psychological insight.  But they also tended toward exaggeration, sentimentalization and didacticism.  But from an interest in regions grew an awareness of commonality.  From particulars of place, poets began to generalize characteristics of American culture, and realism became a deliberate rejection of romanticism.  Poets continued to focus on ordinary people in actual settings, but they avoided inflated and emotional language by combining close observation with precise description.  Their interest in everyday life led to examinations of social norms, but even then the realists tried not to preach, allowing their subjects to speak for themselves.

Robinson

Edwin Arlington (E. A.) Robinson may be the only major American poet who has treated human beings as the sole matter of poetry.  It was through people that Robinson glimpsed the universal condition--the psychological, motivational aspects of behavior.  His poems are dramatic narratives that force the audience to engage in speculation, for in any representative poem there are as many truths as there are auditors, which is remarkable considering each poem involves a single view and a single personality.  Robinson's poetry reveals a compulsion to comprehend experience even when it is incomprehensible.  As the following poem--"Miniver Cheevy" (1910)--illustrates, his characters are unable to endure themselves or to resolve their thoughts:
     Miniver Cheevy, child of scorn,
          Grew lean while he assailed the seasons;
     He wept that he was ever born,
          And he had reasons.

     Miniver loved the days of old
          When swords were bright and steeds were prancing;
     The vision of a warrior bold
          Would set him dancing.

     Miniver sighed for what was not,
          And dreamed, and rested from his labors;
     He dreamed of Thebes and Camelot,
          And Priam's neighbors.

     Miniver mourned the ripe renown
          That made so many a name so fragrant;
     He mourned Romance, now on the town,
          And Art, a vagrant.

     Miniver loved the Medici,
          Albeit he had never seen one;
     He would have sinned incessantly
          Could he have been one.

     Miniver cursed the commonplace
          And eyed a khaki suit with loathing;
     He missed the medieval grace
          Of iron clothing.

     Miniver scorned the gold he sought,
          But sore annoyed was he without it;
     Miniver thought, and thought, and thought,
          And thought about it.

     Miniver Cheevy, born too late,
          Scratched his head and kept on thinking;
     Miniver coughed, and called it fate,
          And kept on drinking.²

The bareness of Robinson's verse, the absence of distinct images is conspicuous.  Much of his imagery is intellectual and scholarly.  Usually the characters in a poem--especially in a narrative poem--are set in a distinguishable place, but there is little description of the outside world in this and other poems.  Any externalities are diluted quickly by the anguished introversion of his characters.

The tone of the narrator's voice is distinctive.  Although the subjects and forms of Robinson's poems vary, the tone of a single voice unifies his poetry.  Whether the narrator is ironic, bitter, self-mocking, gentle or humorous, there is always an undertone of compassion sans sentimentality.  Robinson is able to exhibit and shift the tone of his narrators through lineation.  Declarative sentences do most of the work.  But at those places he breaks the sentences are where changes in meaning occur, the whole poem shifting slightly yet clearly with each break.

Robinson's poetry exhibits variance.  The works of his second period (1912 -- 1927) are in a particular blank verse suitable to lengthy narration, natural dialogue, dramatic effects, and philosophic discussion.  The Arthurian poems--Merlin (1917), Lancelot (1920), Tristram (1927)--are faithful to the sources.  But Robinson contemporizes the characters and uses his wit to draw parallels between the chaos of Arthur's world and the condition of society at the time of composition.

In his third period, Robinson composed several long narratives about modern life.  Cavender's House (1929), The Glory of the Nightingales (1930), and Matthias at the Door (1931) are psychological studies on the nature of guilt or fidelity and the desire for power or possession.  They are the climax of his criticism of modern life.  In them Robinson subtly incorporates the symbols of light, darkness, regeneration and responsibility that are predominant in his poetry from The Children of the Night (1897) to Tristram, in which they reach their highest tragic synthesis.

Frost

Robert Frost, like his modernist contemporaries, discerned the increasing gravity and precariousness of the human predicament--the decline of religious belief and metaphysical certitude and the subversion of Enlightenment rationalism and of romantic intuition which left the unprotected individual at risk in an indifferent universe and in an increasingly violent world--but his strongly regional conservatism compelled him to reject the formal experimentation that propelled modernism internationally.

In 1900, with his grandfather's assistance, Frost purchased a farm in Derry, New Hampshire.  He supported his wife and four children by a combination of farming and teaching, but they sold the farm in 1912 and relocated to England at the time of the Georgian movement.  There Frost learned from Thomas Hardy's pastoral, regional verse and Edward Thomas' insightful criticism.  A Boy's Will (1913) was hailed in England as a work of genuine merit; it was followed in 1914 by North of Boston; both were republished in the United States within the year.  In 1915, the Frosts settled again on a New Hampshire farm, near Franconia, which induced the title of Mountain Interval (1916).  Selected Poems (1923) preceded New Hampshire (1923), which won the Pulitzer Prize.  An anecdotal discussion of the values of life and character imbued with regional examples, New Hampshire is one of Frost's longest and wittiest poems.  In 1928, he published West-Running Brook; its title poem is a complex masterpiece.  Collected Poems initially appeared in 1930 and earned him his second Pulitzer Prize.  A Further Range (1936) also yielded the Pulitzer Prize.

Few major poets have exhibited such consistency as Frost.  He captures the audience's attention as much by the trustworthiness of his poetic persona as by the appropriateness of his diction and forms.  The subjects and the words of Frost's poems are interdependent, are authentic to the degree that he was able to adapt, more successfully than William Wordsworth, everyday speech to create an impression of naturalness.  Frost rejected free verse and argued that traditional forms permit the clear expression and comprehension of ideas.  In other words, he was a contrapuntist.  In the following poem--"Mending Wall" (1914)--he combines the variable tones and inflections of speech with the metrical pattern of blank verse:
     Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
     That sends the frozen-gound-swell under it
     And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
     And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
     The work of hunters is another thing:
     I have come after them and made repair
     Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
     But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
     To please the yelping dogs.  The gaps I mean,
     No one has seen them made or heard them made,
     But at spring mending-time we find them there.
     I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
     And on a day we meet to walk the line
     And set the wall between us once again.
     We keep the wall between us as we go.
     To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
     And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
     We have to use a spell to make them balance:
     "Stay where you are until our backs are turned!"
     We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
     Oh, just another kind of outdoor game,
     One on a side.  It comes to little more:
     There where it is we do not need the wall:
     He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
     My apple trees will never get across
     And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
     He only says, "Good fences make good neighbors."
     Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
     If I could put a notion in his head:
     "Why do they make good neighbors?  Isn't it
     Where there are cows?  But here there are no cows.
     Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
     What I was walling in or walling out,
     And to whom I was like to give offense.
     Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
     That wants it down."  I could say "Elves" to him,
     But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
     He said it for himself.  I see him there,
     Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
     In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
     He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
     Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
     He will not go behind his father's saying.
     And he likes having thought of it so well
     He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."³
Frost employs declarative sentences to create a distinctive rhythm, for such units, according to him, contain abstract sounds that help communicate meaning.  Furthermore, iambs mimic the natural rhythms of speech better than other feet.  But the rhythms of speech are irregular, and meter, especially accentual-syllabic meter, is orderly, so Frost sets in direct opposition variable sentences against iambic lines.

Apart from his talent for public reading, Frost's popularity arose from his ability to convey seemingly simple ideas via common language and familiar images.  His descriptive meditations contain contrasts: lightness and darkness, hope and doom.  (In "Mending Wall" the structure symbolizes the division between the primitive and civilized.)  In some poems the darkness or doom is apparent; in other poems it is concealed.  Although Frost's vision of humanity is relatively optimistic, humanity is not innocent.  He disagreed with Emerson's blindness to evil and insisted that an enduring dualism is the dialectic of man and nature.  His New England pastorals--"Home Burial" (1914), "For Once, Then, Something" (1923), "West-Running Brook" (1928), "Design" (1936), "Directive" (1947)--test the premises of Puritanism and transcendentalism without drawing conclusions.  In other poems Frost affirms an individualism restrained by innate principles, an echo of early transcendentalism.  He avoids didacticism while seeking truths inherent in humans and nature.

A peculiar feature of Frost's work is the position from which his poetic persona observes or considers humans and nature.  Woods symbolize the unexplored portion within oneself and may contain lightness and/or darkness, hope and/or doom.  But one does not enter the woods, except in dreams, out of fear or morality.  Whereas Poe courageously enters the inner wilderness, Frost contentedly stops at the edge of the woods.  He also does not follow Whitman to a height that allows a panorama of society and nature.  Thus, Frost is a poet neither of the woods nor of the mountains; rather, he is a poet of the pastures, the intervals.

In "Come In" (1942), for example, the speaker, narrating in the past tense, presents himself as having arrived at a place of boundaries--between forest and field, night and day, earth and sky.  He heard a thrush's song through the darkening trees and felt the draw of sorrow.  But he decided to ignore the invitation and to gaze at the stars.

     As I came to the edge of the woods,
     Thrush music--hark!
     Now if it was dusk outside,
     Inside it was dark.

     Too dark in the woods for a bird
     By sleight of wing
     To better its perch for the night,
     Though it still could sing.

     The last of the light of the sun
     That had died in the west
     Still lived for one song more
     In a thrush's breast.

     Far in the pillared dark
     Thrush music went--
     Almost like a call to come in
     To the dark and lament.

     Bu no, I was out for stars:
     I would not come in.
     I meant not even if asked,
     And I hadn't been.⁴

The poem concerns mood rather than description, although the entire poem, excepting the penultimate and ultimate lines, is a sketch of a scene.  Frost never exclusively presents a scene; he always converts his imagery into a second subject.  In "Come In" the imagery--forest, song, shades, stars--becomes symbolic by way of the narrator's reflective activity.  As we proceed from quatrain to quatrain, the poem's symbolic structure begins to materialize: the speaker paused between open field and enclosed forest, it was twilight, the narrator hesitated between going inside or staying outside.  The speaker was not outdoors merely for a pleasant stroll.  The penultimate stanza reveals the symbolic significance of the narrator's representation of the landscape: he was resisting the temptation of despair.  The entire scene and the speaker's response to it become symbolic of his inner struggle, which is the poem's true theme.  Scene and response are the vehicle of and inner struggle is the tenor of the fundamental metaphor which is the poem.

Most of the langauge of "Come In" is literal, but in the third stanza, "the light of the sun" is personified as having "died in the west," though it "Still lived for one song more / In a thrush's breast."  That figure is enfolded within another and more important figure: the narrator identified the dying sunlight with the thrush's song.  The thrush is singing, in other words, of the death of the day.  Those associations are reinforced by the imagery of extremity which permeates the poem: "edge of the woods," "Too dark," "The last of the light," "one song more," "Far in the pillared dark."  The mood is of desperation.  But in the ultimate stanza, the speaker admits he realized the whole was a projection of his own despair.  Whereas the first two lines refer to the vehicle (response and scene), the last two lines lead us out of the symbolic structure the narrator has persuaded us to build, the same one he himself built.

Ransom

Robert Frost and John Crowe Ransom admired each other's work and agreed that form is necessary to restrain the voice's modulations.  Ransom maintained that poets and poetry need the freedom and permanence of metrical form especially in a century of free verse and modernism.  During a period of war and dissolution, he emphasized love, honor, tradition and order; in an era of doubt and abstraction, he advocated intellectual intensity and clarity.  Briefly, Ransom's poetic forms and his fundamental attitudes reflect his interest in tradition.  Contrastingly, the characteristics of his mature poetry--ambiguous diction, subtle irony, metaphysical conceit, detached tone--are modern.

Ransom's conservative metrical theories stemmed from his distaste for the sentimentality of the romantic poets and from his fear of the enervative effects of science on the perceptive ability of humans.  Versification, according to him, is a way to explore ideas and sounds that one would ignore in the rush to express oneself.  It is a necessary discipline that prevents the poet's subjectivity from affecting the objects of his/her poem and the process of communication.  One could argue that the following poem, "The Equilibrists" (1925), is not only about the love between a man and a woman, but also about the love that must mediate between the poet and his/her poem or between the idea and the form.

     Full of her long white arms and milky skin
     He had a thousand times remembered sin.
     Alone in the press of people traveled he,
     Minding her jacinth, and myrrh, and ivory.

     Mouth he remembered: the quaint orifice
     From which came heat that flamed upon the kiss,
     Till cold words came down spiral from the head.
     Grey doves from the officious tower illsped.

     Body: it was a white field ready for love,
     On her body's field, with the gaunt tower above,
     The lilies grew, beseeching him to take,
     If he would pluck and wear them, bruise and break.

     Eyes talking: Never mind the cruel words,
     Embrace my flowers, but not embrace the swords.
     But what they said, the doves came straightway flying
     And unsaid: Honor, Honor, they came crying.

     Importunate her doves.  Too pure, too wise,
     Clambering on his shoulder, saying, Arise,
     Leave me now, and never let us meet,
     Eternal distance now command thy fleet.

     Predicament indeed, which thus discovers
     Honor among thieves, Honor between lovers.
     O such a little word is Honor, they feel!
     But the grey word is between them cold as steel.

     At length I saw these lovers fully were come
     Into their torture of equilibrium;
     Dreadfully had forsworn each other, and yet
     They were bound each to each, and they did not forget.

     And rigid as two painful stars, and twirled
     About the clustered night their prison world,
     They burned with fierce love always to come near,
     But honor beat them back and kept them clear

     Ah, the strict lovers, they are ruined now!
     I cried in anger.  But with puddled brow
     Devising for those gibbeted and brave
     Came I descanting: Man, what would you have?

     For spin your period out, and draw your breath,
     A kinder saeculum begins with Death.
     Would you ascend to Heaven and bodiless dwell?
     Or take your bodies honorless to Hell?

     In Heaven you have heard no marriage is,
     No white flesh tinder to your lecheries,
     Your male and female tissue sweetly shaped
     Sublimed away, and furious blood escaped.

     Great lovers lie in Hell, the stubborn ones
     Infatuate of the flesh upon the bones;
     Stuprate, they rend each other when they kiss,
     The pieces kiss again, no end to this.

     But still I watched them spinning, orbited nice.
     Their flames were not more radiant than their ice.
     I dug in the quiet earth and wrought the tomb
     And made these lines to memorize their doom:--

     EPITAPH

     Equilibrists lie here; stranger, tread light;
     Close, but untouching in each other's sight;
     Mouldered the lips arid ashy the tall skull.
     Let them lie perilous and beautiful.⁵

Ransom's principal concern is the destruction of the civilized attitude of respect and love by the predatory approach of conquest and control, and he explores the subject via women and sexuality, creating lovers whose inhibitions keep them apart.  Without some comprehension of the central metaphor in "The Equilibrists," one likely will miss the significance of the observer's attitude.  The male lover's predatory temperament may be characteristic of cultures, may be a fundamental metaphysical principle.  Extending his metaphor further, one discerns the sexual union, even in wedlock, is rape unless it is accomplished with the restraint and humility that are the traits of a gentleman.  Similarly, when creating art, acquiring knowledge, and building civilizations, the pursuer must approach each act with respect and love.

In many of his poems, Ransom contrasts the body (passion, grief) with the head (intellect, honor).  In "The Equilibrists" he balances the two parts, represented as love and honor, by means of a metaphysical conceit: twin stars that revolve around each other.  Neither love nor honor is relinquished or diminished; though the lover desires the lady, he is reluctant to seize her.  Because his restraint is as strong as his lust, a precarious equilibrium, a dance, occurs.  The obligation to maintain the lady's inviolability and the concomitant urge to engage in sexual intercourse bring the lovers to an orbit that checks the polarities.

Initially the observer proposes alternatives, heaven (honor) or hell (passion), but the observer eventually perceives that the lovers are in a pleasant balance.  The observer respects their condition and memorializes them with a tomb and a quatrain.  The reader must be careful lest he/she disturb the susceptible equilibrium and combine the elements that should remain asunder.

The ultimate stanza implies the lovers' achievement is historical; their feat must be remembered and rendered.  Ransom is suggesting, as he does in many other poems, that the act of composition gives form and permanence to principles, and he is suggesting that the act of balancing reality (norms) and myth (ideals) is difficult.  Ransom's ability to anthropomorphize principles--that is, to embody values in concrete figures--is unique.  The male, whose lust could debase and destroy the desirable object, is the norm, and the female, who demands and deserves respect, is the ideal.

Poetic composition, as Ransom conceived it, requires a respectful attitude toward nature, toward life, and his poems intimate an attitude that is simultaneously reverential and indifferent, a dichotomy he never synthesized but controlled via form.  His goals as a poet were to experience reality, to allow those experiences to yield general principles, and to depict truly the deterioration of those values.  Ransom quickly achieved his goals.  After Chills and Fever (1924) and Two Gentlemen in Bonds (1927), he devoted himself chiefly to teaching and advocating the New Criticism.

Naturalism (1890 -- 1914)

The work of the American realists was affirmed and strengthened by the popularity of European realists--William Thackeray, Charles Dickens, Gustave Flaubert--near the end of the nineteenth century.  The European realists reinforced the concept of pessimistic determinism that steadily spread in the 1890's, when naturalism became full-blown in the United States.  The naturalists used the realistic movement as the basis to establish patterns that would influence modernistic literature.

Strict naturalism in the European sense did not flourish immediately in a country whose citizens understood that political remedies for social injustice were available, though the remedies sometimes were opposed or postponed.  When Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species in 1859, Whitman was able to regard the work as verification of an idealistic belief in human progress.  After 1880, however, religious doubt, moral instability, and social unrest began to predominate in American culture.

Before Darwin's theory most people believed the world had been operating via a divine plan.  But his theory does not appeal to divine ends.  Evolution occurs by chance variation.  Whereas the utility of a trait sometimes accounts for its survival, it does not explain the trait's initial appearance.

Another influential idea of nineteenth-century science, mechanistic determinism, reinforced Darwin's theory.  Determinism postulates that everything in the universe is governed by causal laws.  Accordingly, every event has a prior condition, and all events are predictable if all the prior conditions are known.  As social scientists proposed causal explanations about human decisions and conduct, many people started to think of humans as animals or machines, and they adopted the same scientific approach toward all of them, viewing behavior as events that occur in an orderly way.  If choices and actions are causally determined, then only one course of action can occur: the one which will be the effect of the previous causes that are occurring in the situation.  In other words, the act that a person ultimately chooses is inevitable; the person cannot act in another way.  That means freedom and moral responsibility are illusions.

A third nineteenth-century movement--Herbert Spencer's individualism, which is sometimes called social Darwinism--asserts that unchecked competition between individuals is nature's way of improving the species.  Poverty and suffering are natural ways of eliminating the unfit.  Charity and compassion, unless controlled, are social threats because they artificially preserve those who are least able to maintain themselves.  Responsibility, while perhaps suitable for personal relations or for public administration, is not suitable for business.  Laissez-faire economists such as William Graham Sumner and industrialists such as Andrew Carnegie were followers of Spencer, but many others watched the industrial masses, poverty-stricken in a time of abundance, and wondered whether the movement was ethical.

From such disturbances the first American naturalistic writers emerged, but they were not merely the products of philosophy.  They were impressed by the literary power of European naturalists--the novelists Fyodor Dostoevsky, Emile Zola, and Leo Tolstoy; the poets Robert Browning, Thomas Hardy, and Rudyard Kipling--and by the value of empirical descriptions of experience in effecting realistic portrayals of life.

Crane

Among the avant-garde writers of the 1890's, Stephen Crane was the harbinger of the twentieth-century revolution in literature.  Even more than Frank Norris, E. A. Robinson, Hamlin Garland, or Theodore Dreiser--his contemporaries--he broke literary tradition with respect to theme, style and voice.  It was Crane's nature to be experimental.  When he was twenty years old, Crane wrote Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), the first wholly naturalistic novel produced in the United States.  Although Maggie is not a great book, its portrayal of brutality and degradation in New York's slums was unique at the time of its creation.  By the age of twenty-four, Crane had produced, in short stories and The Red Badge of Courage (1895), the first examples of modern American impressionism.  Written by a man who had no combat experience, The Red Badge of Courage depicts the actualities of war, specifically the Battle of Chancellorsville.  That year, 1895, Crane became the first writer to respond publicly to Dickinson's innovative poetry.  The Black Riders and Other Lines is a volume of imagist impressionism that was twenty years ahead of the movement.  And before he reached his twenty-ninth birthday, Crane had died, leaving enough work to fill twenty volumes in a collected edition.

Crane accepted the naturalistic idea that the destiny of a human, similar to the biological fate of an animal, is determined by agents beyond the control of the individual's will.  Considering determinism offers no rationale for optimism, one would expect his themes to be pessimistic.  They are.  In The Black Riders the world is a rudderless ship set adrift by a spiteful and neglectful God.  Institutional religion has devoted itself to the material world and has turned life's simple pleasures into sins.  Conventional morality is a sham; truth and wisdom are illusions.  Crane establishes the atmosphere and introduces his style in the first poem of the volume:
     Black Riders came from the sea.
     There was clang and clang of spear and shield,
     The clash and clash of hoof and heel,
     Wild shouts and the wave of hair
     In the rush upon the wind:
     Thus the ride of sin.⁶

The volume, the poem starts with a symbol that he employs to steer the reader's emotional response.  The juxtaposition of the absence of light and the horsemen implies a warning similar to the inscription at the entrance to Hell: "Abandon all hope, you who enter here."⁷  (III.9)  Crane's use of color reflects an adherence to the objective method by which the French naturalists, or impressionists, achieved a correspondence between their perceptions and reality.  He believed that if he realistically portrayed events, they would impart their own emotional energy without sentimentalization, moralization or interpretation.  Frequently detached and nonjudgmental, the impressionists regarded their subjects as opportunities to depict optical sensations.  They perceived figures and objects as agents for the absorption and reflection of light.  Because there are no sharp edges, no fine lines, in nature, the impressionists implied form and space by way of infinitely various intensities of color and light.

Crane's color schemes are suitable for allegories, and many of his poems are such.  To construct an allegory, he outlines a situation in which there is a tension between two oppositional forces.  He removes from the narrative all the details of the conflict that would restrict his description only to the particular situation.  The result is a dynamic and universal representation of conflict.  Because he does not name or describe his figures, because he sets them in opposition to elemental forces, because he figuratively depicts their ambitions and predicaments, Crane is able to offer imaginary representations of the real world.

Crane's allegoric poems are similar to his symbolistic poems; the difference between them is structural.  The allegoric poems begin with a tenor (a subject), and a vehicle (a metaphorical term) is correlated with it.  The symbolistic poems begin with a vehicle ("Black Riders," for example), and a tenor ("sin," for example) is revealed or suggested by Crane or effected by the audience.  The basis of the connection between vehicle and tenor in "Black Riders" is narrative development, whereby one thing (the horsemen) becomes associated with another (violence).  In his more structurally complex poems, Crane--similar to the Symbolists Charles Baudelaire, Stephane Mallarme, Paul Verlaine--forces his audience to suppose the significance of the thoughts and emotions which his poems gradually reveal.  But whereas a Symbolist poem has manifold meanings, a Crane poem has a certain meaning, though it may be complicated.  His symbols are not metaphors detached from his subjects; rather, the relation of his metaphors to their subjects must be inferred.

To the extent that Crane's symbols have certain though implied meanings, they are closer to the objective correlative described by T. S. Eliot than they are to the symbols of Symbolism or to the images of Imagism.⁸  Crane resembles the Imagists in three respects: in clarity, exactness and concreteness of detail; in economy of language and brevity of treatment; and in organic development of rhythm.  But he differs from the Imagists in a major respect.  An Imagistic poem presents a captured moment of experience in a static manner that evokes an intellectual and emotional awareness of something outside the poem.  But nearly all of Crane's imagistic poems are themselves in motion, having plots as his allegories have plots.  Even with their central metaphors, the poems force attention inward upon themselves, not outward to extrinsic associations.

War Is Kind, published four years after Black Riders, is less allegorical and more stylistically mature.  Crane's experience as a war correspondent during the interim obviously influenced him.  He augments some of the earlier themes and enlarges the scope of his perceptions and thoughts.  One new motif is the sea, which is the basis of three complete poems; another is a realistic awareness of social conflict.

Many critics have been classifying Crane's poems as free verse.  Contemporary reviewers recognized definite affiliations with Whitman and Dickinson, both of whom in the nineties represented stylistic innovation and unconventional effect.  After the publication of The Black Riders, however, he no longer rebelled against such conventions as stanzas and refrains.  In his long poems, Crane frequently combines a fixed stanzaic structure with an allusive central metaphor.  "Do Not Weep, Maiden, for War Is Kind" is perhaps Crane's most structurally complex poem, exhibiting numerous poetic techniques many associate with conventional verse: imagery, stanza, metaphor, irony, parallelism, refrain.

     Do not weep, maiden, for war is kind.
     Because your lover threw wild hands toward the sky
     And the affrighted steed ran on alone,
     Do not weep.
     War is kind.

          Hoarse, booming drums of the regiment,
          Little souls who thirst for fight,
          These men were born to drill and die.
          The unexplained glory flies above them,
          Great is the battle-god, great, and his kingdom--
          A field where a thousand corpses lie.

     Do not weep, babe, for war is kind.
     Because your father tumbled in the yellow trenches,
     Raged at his breast, gulped and died,
     Do not weep.
     War is kind.

          Swift blazing flag of the regiment,
          Eagle with crest of red and gold,
          These men were born to drill and die.
          Point for them the virtue of slaughter,
          Make plain to them the excellence of killing
          And a field where a thousand corpses lie.

     Mother whose heart hung humble as a button
     On the bright splendid shroud of your son,
     Do not weep.
     War is kind.⁹

In Crane's indifferent universe, because there is neither an almighty ruler nor a supreme order, there is conflict, leading to wars.  Appeals to god, no longer an omnipotent being, prove inadequate; by the time god answers, the armies are in battle.  Even god's supposed endorsement is secondary to the main engines of war: tradition and patriotism.  Tragically, the combative instinct is part of humanity's genotype.  War produces praiseworthy conduct, and it produces horror.  "War Is Kind" celebrates duty as it emphasizes pain--the densely ironic stanzas supporting the grief of the wife, child and mother.

Crane's intense interest in war spanned his creative career.  The wonder of war, the thrill of combat, and the toil of battle are subjects of his short stories, novels, and news dispatches.  Nearly two dozen of Crane's poems are about war; war's glamour and its senselessness, for instance, are important themes in both volumes.

Although Crane's poems are limited in range, they fully explore his psyche.  To appreciate his poetry, one must understand that his intent and manner differ from most other poets' intent and manner.  Crane's poems are personal, expressing his sense of fate, his sense of isolation.  Only Poe approached Crane's desolate outpost from which he views and elicits a universe in which force is law, love is doom, God is indifferent, humanity's fate is misery, hope is courage, and courage is self-sacrifice.  Behind the hope and despair there is a voice, a human presence.  Crane's true voice is characterized by humility, kindness, determination, and a belief in a symbolic truth that is elusive yet real.  Crane's false voice is characterized by pride, dogmatism, aggressiveness, and an insistence on a literal truth.  He often affirms the first voice, and he always mocks the second voice.  Crane's true voice frees us to participate in his imaginative experience and to contemplate a part of ourselves.

Conclusion

There is no gap among the nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary movements in the United States.  Victorian principles lingered as genteel customs until World War I.  The roots of the modern temperament, which produced a twentieth-century renaissance, were in the intellectual activities of the previous century.  One strand of modernism can be traced to the optimistic voice of Whitman; another strand can be traced to the realistic movement, with its emphasis on character, psychology and objectivism; and another can be traced to the uncertainties that germinated naturalism.  Between 1865 and 1915, the nation which Abraham Lincoln had envisioned as strong and unified became an actuality.  But as the social problems of the country grew proportionately with its industrial and economic development, many people began to raise grave questions about the quality of American life.

For those who regarded the moral apathy with displeasure, realism helped to neutralize their discomfort.  Because the romantics treated reality as a single, harmonious moral order and ignored empirical methods and evolution itself, the realists believed their idealistic approach did not effectively deal with the problems of the age.  Instead, the realists denied there are clear-cut distinctions between matter and mind, science and morals, experience and reason.  They examined human ideas and ideals from biological and social points of view, treated them as instruments for apprehending experience, and judged them in relation to their contexts.  An idea's or ideal's capacity to solve a problem, not its connection to some transcendent or ultimate reality, determined its value.  Rather than describing an imaginary world, the realists depicted ordinary people in actual settings.  The social problems, although lamentable, were inspirational, inciting realists to attempt to solve them.

As the social problems worsened in the late nineteenth century, writers became less optimistic about the future of the United States.  Similar to the realists, the naturalists believed that physical objects exist independently of perception and that literature should portray objects, actions, and social conditions as they actually are.  Furthermore, writers could contribute to an objective understanding of the world by addressing social problems.  But the naturalists were pessimistic.  They doubted the existence of free will and depicted subjects caught in forces beyond their control, their actions determined by heredity and environment.  Whereas realism is an attempt to reproduce faithfully ordinary life, in which unexceptional people undergo everyday experiences, naturalism, being a kind of realism, is an attempt to reproduce faithfully a section of existence, in which ignoble people deal with the more severe or disagreeable aspects of reality.

It is important to note that several features of the realistic movement continue to exert influence on poetics: insistence on analytic observation of a subject and a determination to portray it exactly, without subjective intrusions; emphasis on psychological reality and an enlargement of the poet's selection of themes, ideas that might have been rejected as commonplace or sordid; recognition of the indeterminate nature of truth and the creation of a voice that is often incapable of expressing fully what it perceives; and indication of the importance of literary effort by stressing the poet's social function as interpreter and critic of life.
________________________________________________________
     ¹Academy of American Poets, "The Marshes of Glynn," Poets.org, 2013, http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16813 (3 October 2013).
     ²Edwin Arlington Robinson, Selected Poems, ed. Robert Faggen (New York: Penguin, 1997) 67 - 68.
     ³Robert Frost, The Poetry of Robert Frost, ed. Edward Connery Lathem (New York: Henry Holt, 1979) 33.
     ⁴Ibid., 334.
     ⁵John Crowe Ransom, Selected Poems (New York: Knopf, 1991) 85.
     ⁶J. C. Levenson, ed., Stephen Crane: Prose and Poetry (New York: Library of America, 1996) 1299.
     ⁷Robert Hollander, "Inferno," Princeton Dante Project, 1998, http://www.etcweb.princeton.edu/cgi-bin/dante/campuscgi/mpb/GetCantoSection.pl?INP_Poem=Inf&INP_SECT=1&INP-Start=1&INP_LEN=15&LANG=2 (7 October 2013).
     ⁸Eliot's aesthetic--a poem must evoke emotion only by the representation of sensory experience--actually was conventional in the nineteenth century.
     ⁹J. C. Levenson, ed., Stephen Crane: Prose and Poetry (New York: Library of America, 1996) 1325. 

Poetic Development in the U.S.: Romanticism

"Romanticism" is the first installment of a series that focuses on poetic development in the United States.  The second installment is a superficial examination of realism.

Preface

One aspect of history fundamental to the comprehension of Western literature is the idea that regardless how novel a cultural development may seem, it is not discontinuous from the aggregate intellectual and artistic achievements that precede it.  Even Jean-Jacques Rousseau's and Soren Kierkegaard's great imaginative leaps must be viewed as a part of the intellectual environment in which their philosophies were born.  Such a sense of continuity leads to two important conclusions.  First, a sympathetic understanding of the past permits a more complete appreciation of current achievements.  Second, the past, in contrast with being a repository, is the root of an organic process that continuously nourishes present and future achievements.  The continuity of Western literature is best illustrated by the way in which writers continue to draw from the past to create original works.  To demonstrate the creative continuity, we will attend to several representative figures, each recognizably romantic, their romanticism rooted in and continuous with the achievements of their predecessors.

Historical Background

The source of the romantic movement was the Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose Discourse on the Origins of the Inequality of Mankind (1754) and The Social Contract (1762) provoked the French Revolution.  In those treatises he argues that human beings were essentially good and equal in the state of nature, but the introduction of property, agriculture, science and commerce corrupted them.  People entered into a social contract among themselves, establishing governments and educational systems to correct the inequalities brought by the rise of civilization.  His theory of the natural man influenced such figures as the German philosopher Immanuel Kant and the German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

Goethe and his contemporaries, the philosopher and critic Johann Gottfried von Herder and the historian Justus Moser, provided the movement with more formal precepts via Von deutscher Art und Kunst (Of German Style and Art, 1773), in which they extol the romantic spirit in German folk songs, Gothic architecture, and Shakespeare's plays.  Goethe attempted to imitate Shakespeare's untrammeled style in his Gotz von Berlichingen (1773), an historical drama about a sixteenth-century robber knight.  The play, which justifies revolt against political authority, inaugurated the Sturm und Drang ("Storm and Stress") movement, a harbinger of German romanticism.  Goethe's novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) exalts romantic sentiment, justifying suicide by reason of unrequited love.  Many of the British romantics incorporated the novel's tone and mood--frenzy, melancholy, world-weariness, self-destruction--into their works and into their lives.

British Romanticism (1785 -- 1830)

As the romantic movement spread from France and Germany to Great Britain and the rest of the West, certain themes and moods, often interlaced, became the concern of almost all nineteenth-century writers.  Many of the libertarian and abolitionist movements of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were engendered by Rousseau's philosophy--the desire to be free of convention and tyranny and the emphasis on the rights and dignity of the individual.

Thus it was inevitable that political and social causes became dominant themes in romantic prose, drama and poetry throughout the West.  Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote passionately in protest against social and political wrongs and in defense of the struggles for liberty in Italy and Greece.  The romantic poets often conveyed their general dissatisfaction with the organization of society as specific criticism of urban society.  In the preface to Lyrical Ballads (1802), William Wordsworth refers to "the encreasing [sic] accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident," and in "Milton" (1804) William Blake mentions the "dark Satanic Mills" that had begun to deface the English countryside.^1,2  Fundamental to such sentiments was a concern with nature and natural surroundings, which is a theme of John Denham's "Cooper's Hill" (1655), a poem that had a formative influence on English romantic poetry, specifically Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" (1802).  And the romantics often regarded their environments with melancholy.  A sense of imminent change is apparent in "Ode on Melancholy" (1820) by John Keats.  The romantics' melancholic tendency and their imaginative freedom produced a trend toward the irrational and the supernatural.  Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" (1816) and Keats' "The Eve of St. Agnes" (1819) reinforce the romantics' disillusion with eighteenth-century rationalism.

The essence of romanticism is difficult to describe because it was more an attitudinal than a stylistic shift.  For example, the romantics focused on their emotions and the expression of them.  The revival of classical ideas of form in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries imposed too rigid an intellectual control on individual emotions.  The romantics, rather than restricting emotional expression to a predetermined form, allowed their feelings to predominate and organize their poems.  The emphasis on emotion instead of intellect led to the expression of subjective rather than objective visions.  Composition was a way to examine feelings, not a means to arrive at some general truth.  Their subjectivism produced another attitude: fondness for the fantastic and the exotic, making it possible to probe more deeply into one's creative imagination.  Dreams, according to the romantics, released the mind from the constraints of everyday experience and brought to the surface the dark visions reason had submerged.  Finally, the romantics had a mystical attachment to nature.  Whereas the neoclassicists had turned to nature in search of order and reason, the romantics viewed nature as unpredictable and as a reflection of the writer's emotions.

Wordsworth

"Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings": that is William Wordsworth's crucial formulation in the preface to Lyrical Ballads, a collection of poems by both Wordsworth and Coleridge.³  The metaphor "overflow" ("expression" or "projection") is diametrical to imitation and indicates that the source of a poem is no longer the external world but the poet himself.  Furthermore, "overflow" suggests a fluid compositional process, a process that is not calculated but "spontaneous."  Although the poet's emotions are the impetus, the success of composition is attendant upon contemplation, for "Poets do not write for Poets alone, but for men."⁴

Lyrical Ballads succeeded a century of developments in the neoclassical mode and became the most important manifesto of the emotive theory of poetry.  In discussions of poetry as an imitation of human actions, the proper poetic forms had been narrative and dramatic, and the usual antithesis to poetry had been history.  But Wordsworth, conceiving poetry as the language of emotion, regarded the lyric, rather than the epic or tragedy, as the exemplary form, and he interchanged history and science as contrary to poetry.  Throughout the development of romanticism, imagination and emotion and intuition were acclaimed over imitation and logic and science.  And the romantics expressed their freedom by rejecting such conventions as regular meter, strict form, and tragic unity.

Despite their diverse concerns, the romantics shared one attitude: optimism.  The ideals of freedom and equality that the French Revolution had promised--even when subsequent developments suggested the fight against tyranny was not over--persisted in British romantic poetry.  The freshness and boldness of Wordsworth's poems reflected the romantic sense of hope, which William Hazlitt deemed The Spirit of the Age (1825).  "Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour, July 13, 1798" exudes the mood of the period.  Wordsworth divided the poem into four parts.  In lines 1 through 23, the speaker sets a meditative scene; in the second part (lines 23 -- 58), he ponders the significance of the landscape.  Lines 59 through 112 are the heart of the poem in which the speaker reviews the meanings the landscape had for him at different stages of his life.  In the fourth part (lines 112 -- 160), the speaker attempts to convince his friend (Wordsworth's sister, Dorothy) that the landscape will restore her tranquility.  The following excerpt is from the third part of the poem, lines 68 -- 103.

          I came among these hills; when like a roe
          I bounded o'er the mountains, by the sides
          Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams,
          Wherever nature led; more like a man
          Flying from something that he dreads, than one
          Who sought the thing he loved.  For nature then
          (The coarser pleasures of my boyish days,
          And their glad animal movements all gone by,)
          To me was all in all.--I cannot paint
          What then I was.  The sounding cataract
          Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock,
          The mountain, and the deep gloomy wood,
          Their colours and their forms, were then to me
          An appetite: a feeling and a love,
          That had no need of a remoter charm,
          By thought supplied, or any interest
          Unborrowed from the eye.--That time is past,
          And all its aching joys are now no more,
          And all its dizzy raptures.  Not for this
          Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur: other gifts
          Have followed, for such loss, I would believe,
          Abundant recompence.  For I have learned
          To look on nature, not as in the hour
          Of thoughtless youth, but hearing oftentimes
          The still, sad music of humanity,
          Not harsh nor grating, though of ample power
          To chasten and subdue.  And I have felt
          A presence that disturbs me with the joy
          Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
          Of something far more deeply interfused,
          Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
          And the round ocean, and the living air,
          And the blue sky, and in the mind of man,
          A motion and a spirit, that impels
          All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
          And rolls through all things.⁵

The speaker's direct encounter with the landscape is obvious; many of Wordsworth's poems were composed in ecstatic response to a physical confrontation with nature.  His response is rapturous but lacks the descriptive details the reader needs to translate it into congruent images.  In neoclassical poetry select details provide the concrete material of vivid description, but in "Tintern Abbey" Wordsworth merges perception and cognition to achieve a subjective union with a pantheistic Nature.  Emotions that would otherwise be evoked by the apprehension of descriptive details are expressed directly in wholly subjective terms.

Wordsworth's reformation of poetic description and revitalization of poetic diction are linked.  The complex thought process is expressed in plain language.  His intention was to make his poetry accessible to everybody, "to bring [his] language near to the real language of men."⁶  In contrast with the language of such eighteenth-century works as Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock (1714), the words are straightforward and there are no classical or literary allusions.

A religious sense of humanity's relationship with nature is pervasive in much of Wordsworth's early work.  He considered God apparent everywhere in nature, and he considered a connection between nature and soul.  But Wordsworth's religious and political opinions changed to the degree that by 1810 he was staunchly conservative.  His circle of friends, including the Scottish author Sir Walter Scott, influenced him in the direction of orthodoxy, and the rise of Napoleon in France disillusioned him.  A series of personal disaster--the death of his brother in 1805, a bitter quarrel with Coleridge in 1810, the death of two of his five children in 1812, and the physical and mental decline of Dorothy in the 1830's--seemed to have dulled Wordsworth's vision and inspiration.  Many of his later poems, although they have sparks of ingenuity, are rhetorical and moralistic.  However, when he was able to recollect a moment of intense experience, he recovered some of his earlier poetic strength.  He wrote the sonnet "Surprised by Joy" (1815) in his forties, and he composed "Extempore Effusion upon the Death of James Hogg" (1835) in his sixties.  Both are comparable with his youthful lyrics.

American Romanticism (1817 -- 1900)⁷

In the United States, life in the nineteenth century was tied to nature, so the dissemination of romantic attitudes to America was inevitable.  The romantic concept of the mystical unity of humans and nature was adopted by a group of American writers who called themselves the transcendentalists.  They affirmed a semireligious attitude toward nature and creativity, believing there was a correlation between the universe (macrocosm) and the soul (microcosm).  According to the transcendentalists, divinity permeated all objects, animate or inanimate, and the fundamental purpose of humanity was union with the Over-Soul.  They regarded intuition, rather than reason, as the highest human faculty.  Fulfillment of one's potential could be accomplished through an acute awareness of the beauty and truth of the surrounding natural environment.  The process was inherently individual; all orthodox tradition was suspicious.

The Greek philosopher Plato proposed the concept of transcendence.  He affirmed the existence of absolute goodness, which he characterized as something beyond description and as comprehensible only through intuition.  Some philosophers later applied his concept to divinity, maintaining that God could not be described or understood in terms based on human experience.  The doctrine that God is transcendent, is existing outside of nature, is a fundamental principle in the orthodox forms of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

The Scholastics used the terms transcendent and transcendental to signify general concepts in an effort to provide a rational content to faith.  The realists recognized six transcendental concepts--ens (essence), unum (unity), bonum (goodness), verum (truth), res (thing), and aliquid (something)--all of which existed independently of both the human mind and individual objects.  The nominalists, on the other hand, believed such universal words had no objective reality outside the mind and only individual things and events existed objectively.

Immanuel Kant was the first philosopher to distinguish between transcendent and transcendental, reserving the term transcendent for those entities, such as God and soul, which exist outside human experience and are therefore unknowable.  He used the term transcendental to signify a priori forms of thought--that is, innate principles with which the mind gives form to perceptions and makes experience intelligible.  Thus transcendental philosophy became the study of pure mind and its a priori forms.  Later German idealist philosophers--specifically Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, and Edmund Husserl--described their views as transcendental.  Consequently, philosophers applied the term transcendentalism to doctrines of metaphysical idealism.

American transcendentalism began with the formation of the Transcendental Club in Boston in 1836.  Among the leaders of the movement were the essayist and lecturer Ralph Waldo Emerson, the feminist and social reformer Margaret Fuller, the preacher Theodore Parker, the educator Bronson Alcott, the philosopher William Ellery Channing, and the author and naturalist Henry David Thoreau.  The Transcendental Club published a magazine, The Dial, and some of the members participated in an experiment in communal living at Brook Farm in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, during the 1840's.  Major transcendentalist works of the American movement include Emerson's Nature (1836) and "Self-Reliance" (1841), as well as many of his metaphysical poems, and Thoreau's Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854), which is an account of an individual's attempt to live simply and in harmony with nature.

Emerson

The prophet of transcendentalism, Ralph Waldo Emerson, enunciated a potent American poetics so powerful that successive poets have had to affirm, qualify or deny it.  After resigning his Unitarian pulpit in Boston because he could no longer adhere to the tenets of Christianity, Emerson immersed himself in German and English romanticism, issued his manifesto Nature, and disseminated the tenets via the lecture circuit.  The "Sage of Concord" assimilated Neoplatonism, German idealism, and Oriental mysticism into a Yankee conviction that individuals who trusted their intuitive insight, which he called transcendental Reason, would discover by way of experience, rather than by way of doctrines or institutions, their harmony with nature and with the Over-Soul immanent in nature.

The poet is unique in that he/she has the ability to receive and impart his/her typological experience.  In the "Language" chapter of Nature (1836), he postulates an inherent similarity among words, things, and absolute truth: "1. Words are the signs of natural facts.  2. Particular natural facts are symbols of particular spiritual facts.  3. Nature is symbol of spirit."⁸  The poet, according to Emerson in "The Rhodora" (1839), is the receptive and expressive medium of the Spirit in nature.

          In May, when sea-winds pierce our solitudes,
          I found the fresh Rhodora in the woods,
          Spreading its leafless blooms in a damp nook,
          To please the desert and the sluggish brook.
          The purple petals, fallen in the pool,
          Made the black water with their beauty gay;
          Here might the red-bird come his plumes to cool,
          And court the flower that cheapens his array.
          Rhodora! if the sages ask thee why
          Tell them, dear, that if eyes were made for seeing,
          Then Beauty is its own excuse for being:
          Why thou wert there, O rival of the rose!
          I never thought to ask, I never knew:
          But, in my simple ignorance, suppose
          The self-same Power that brought me there brought you.⁹

The rhodora is emblematic of the beauty bestowed by Spirit on the world and implanted in human beings.  Poets are able to receive and transmit the deeper meaning of nature, and the beauty of nature is a necessary function for those who seek truth.  Because realization requires the seer to be simultaneously a sayer, the poetic process is organic.  The form of "The Rhodora" grew from the impulse of his insight that "The self-same Power that brought me there brought you."  And the meaning of the poem developed through his extension of the generative experience into words.

Emerson's poems contain the core of his philosophy: transcendentalism is in "Each and All" (1839), "Bacchus" (1847), and "Brahma" (1857); the poet's function is in "Merlin" (1847) and "Uriel" (1847); organic form is in "The Snow-storm" (1841).  He admitted that the works he collected in Poems (1847) and May-Day (1867) did not exemplify adequately the principles of his philosophy and that much of his best poetry was in his prose.  But the rhythmic irregularity, the tonal frankness, and the thematic freshness of his poems predetermine the revolution in form and expression which Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson would initiate.

Poe

Edgar Allen Poe, whom Emerson judged as a bad poet who occasionally wrote good poems, looked to Coleridge, Wordsworth's contemporary and contributor to Lyrical Ballads, as his lodestar in his search for a literary aesthetic.  The principal alternative to Wordsworth's expressive theory, to the view that poetry is the expression of the emotions or subconscious desires of an individual personality, was Coleridge's view that poetry, in its various forms, is the product of "that synthetic and magical power, to which we have exclusively appropriated the name of imagination."¹⁰  God has endowed the poet with an inner source of motion, and his/her imagination's creative activity, generated by the tension of contraries seeking resolution in a new whole, parallels the dynamic principle undelying the created universe.  Following the lead of post-Kantian philosophers, especially Schelling, Coleridge opposes the organic imaginative process to the mechanical operation of fancy, describing the poetic process in terms that are literal for a growing plant and metaphoric for imagination.  It is a self-organizing process.  The poet assimilates disparate materials and via an inherent lawfulness creates an organic unity that "reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities."¹¹  And with that Coleridge inaugurated the organic theory of poetry as well as the aesthetic principle of inclusiveness, which became both the basic conception of poetic unity and the prime criterion of poetic excellence in New Criticism. 

The influence of Coleridge's aesthetics on Poe's is conspicuous.  In Biographia Literaria (1817), Coleridge states:
          A poem is that species of composition, which is opposed to 
          works of science, by proposing for its immediate object 
          pleasure, not truth; and from all other species (having this 
          object in common with it) it is discriminated by proposing to 
          itself such delight from the whole, as is compatible with a
          distinct gratification from each component part.¹²
In "The Poetic Principle" (1848), Poe rejects didactic poetry, defines poetry as the rhythmic creation of beauty, and concludes that a poem is simply a poem and nothing else.  He states elsewhere that a poem should appeal equally to reason and to emotion and should exhibit restraint, beauty and unity.

It was a southern strain of Calvinism which not only predisposed Poe to the Gothic but also disabused him of the transcendentalists' claims.  The poem "Israfel" indicates his susceptibility to the idea of the exalted seer-sayer and his disillusionment with it.

          In Heaven a spirit doth dwell
          "Whose heart-strings are a lute";
          None sing so wildly well
          As the angel Israfel,
          And the giddy stars (so legends tell)
          Ceasing their hymns, attend the spell
               Of his voice, all mute.

          Tottering above
               In her highest noon,
               The enamored moon
          Blushes with love,
               While, to listen, the red levin
               (With the rapid Pleiads, even,
               Which were seven)
               Pauses in Heaven.

          And they say (the starry choir
               And the other listening things)
          That Israfeli's fire
          Is owing to that lyre
               By which he sits and sings--
          The trembling living wire
               Of those unusual strings.

          But the skies that angel trod,
               Where deep thoughts are a duty--
          Where Love's a grown-up God--
               Where the Houri glances are
          Imbued with all the beauty
               Which we worship in a star.

          Therefore, thou art not wrong,
               Israfeli, who despisest
          An unimpassioned song;
          To thee the laurels belong,
               Best bard, because the wisest!
          Merrily live, and long!

          The ecstacies above
               With thy burning measures suit--
          Thy grief, thy joy, thy hate, thy love,
               With the fervor of thy lute--
               Well may the stars be mute!

          Yes, Heaven is thine; but this
          Is a world of sweets and sours;
          Our flowers are merely--flowers,
               And the shadow of thy perfect bliss
          Is the sunshine of ours.

          If I could dwell
          Where Israfel
               Hath dwelt, and he where I,
          He might not sing so wildly well
               A mortal melody,
          While bolder note than this might swell
               From my lyre within the sky.¹³ 

Poe emphasized his poetic creed with the following motto which he included either above or below the text in a number of editions: "And the angel Israfel, [whose heart-strings are a lute,] and who has the sweetest voice of all God's creatures.--Koran"  He had adapted the quotation, excepting the phrase within brackets, from George Sale's translation of the Koran, Section IV (1734), in which Israfel is one of four angels beside God's throne.  Israfel, who symbolizes Emerson's Spirit, remains in heaven.  So what can we, as poets, do if "our flowers are merely--flowers," that is, are not types (figures) but material phenomena?  According to Poe, good poets transform flowers into tropes and create from disorderly nature an orderly art form.  The role of imagination is not to discover typological (figural) truth but to devise metaphorical connection.  In other words, a rhodora should not function as an allegorical emblem (the ecstatic inspiration of Spirit); rather, the rhodora should be a rhodora yet become something more via tropes, metrics, tone and mood.  Beginning with Goethe and Coleridge, the distinction between allegory and symbol became a value judgment, with allegory being didactic and artificial and symbol being natural and organic.  The difference between allegoric and symbolic works is that allegory begins with an abstract idea (a tenor) and a concrete word or phrase (a vehicle) is constructed to fit, whereas symbolism begins with a vehicle and the tenor is educed from it.

By explicating the text of "The Raven" as a rational construction of an irrational narrative, Poe, in "The Philosophy of Composition" (1846), discredits the supposition of intense stimulation in the poetry of the transcendentalists.  The Raven and Other Poems (1845) is the embodiment of his aesthetic.  Poems such as "The Conqueror Worm" and "The Haunted Palace" are attempts to invent the beauty and harmony life lacks.  The woman who died for her purity and beauty in "Ulalume" (1847) is the symbol of nature's failure to match the poet's ideal.  In the following poem, "Annabel Lee" (1849), one finds the same sensibility and symbolic expression.

          It was many and many a year ago,
               In a kingdom by the sea,
          That a maiden there lived whom you may know
               By the name of Annabel Lee;--
          And this maiden she lived with no other thought
               Than to love and be loved by me.

          She was a child and I was a child,
               In this kingdom by the sea,
          But we loved with a love that was more than love--
               I and my Annabel Lee--
          With a love that the winged seraphs of Heaven
               Coveted her and me.

          And this was the reason that, long ago,
               In this kingdom by the sea,
          A wind blew out of a cloud by night
               Chilling my Annabel Lee;
          So that her highborn kinsmen came
               And bore her away from me,
          To shut her up in a sepulcher
               In this kingdom by the sea.

          The angels, not half so happy in Heaven,
               Went envying her and me:--
          Yes! that was the reason (as all men know,
               In this kingdom by the sea)
          That the wind came out of the cloud, chilling
               And killing my Annabel Lee.

          But our love it was stronger by far than the love
               Of those who were older than we--
               Of many far wiser than we--
          And neither the angels in Heaven above
               Nor the demons down under the sea,
          Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
               Of the beautiful Annabel Lee:--

          For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams
               Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
          And the stars never rise but I see the bright eyes
               Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
          And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
          Of my darling, my darling, my life and my bride,
               In her sepulcher there by the sea--
               In her tomb by the side of the sea.¹⁴

Inspired by the loss of a beautiful woman, "Annabel Lee" is a lyric masterpiece.  Repetition, end rhyme, and refrain contribute to the poem's musicality, and the e-sound that pervades the poem creates a somber tone.  "Annabel Lee" reflects the emotional control, scrupulous diction, and imaginative unity that Poe insisted are essential to a creative act.

The woman is a figure of speech for the reason that she has a double meaning; there is tension between what the speaker is saying (vehicle) and what the speaker means (tenor).  But the woman is different from a metaphor because what the speaker is saying is also what the speaker means.  The vehicle is also a tenor.  Thus the woman is a symbol, a metaphor in reverse.  Poe expands the vehicle to the extent it replaces the tenor, leaving the tenor to implication.  The recurrence of "Annabel Lee" suggests a complex relationship; she is not simply a dead figure.

Although Poe devoted much effort to the creation of unique poems, analyzing the effects of every detail, economic necessity forced him to turn to prose.  As a book reviewer, he produced a significant body of criticism.  His witty essays were famous for their exposure of literary pretension, and his theories on the nature of fiction, especially the short story, have had a lasting influence on American and European writers.  Whether or not Poe invented the short story, it is certain that he originated the mystery.  "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841), "The Mystery of Marie Roget" (1842), and "The Purloined Letter" (1844) are predecessors of modern mystery.

Whitman

Walt Whitman regarded Poe as the antithesis of what he wanted to become, so he immersed himself in Emerson's works, the result of his scrutiny being the most complete poetic expression of transcendentalism, Leaves of Grass.  Adhering to Emerson's call in Nature for a prophet with a "transparent eyeball," Whitman created a persona whose expansive yet personal voice advocates humanity, brotherhood and freedom; adhering to Emerson's call for organic form, Whitman initiated a technique known as free verse: lines irregular in length and stresses, patterned not by meter or rhyme but by repetition and rhythm.¹⁵

By regarding rhythm as a fluid instrument of versification, Whitman was able to express freely and suggestively the importance of the individual.  He rejected genteel tradition and made use of colloquial language--a blend of everyday speech, journalistic jargon, and foreign words and phrases.  The combination of the universal voice of nationhood with the expression of personal experience is paradoxical, and Whitman acknowledges such in the opening lines of the final edition of Leaves of Grass (1892): "One's-self I sing, a simple separate person, / Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse."¹⁶  The juxtaposition emphasizes the romantic nature of Whitman's mission: to delineate his thoughts, emotions and reactions in order to communicate a sense of the essential oneness of the human condition.  "Song of Myself," an epic of the democratic individual's consciousness, makes clear his expansive intention:
          I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
          And what I assume you shall assume,
          For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

          I loafe and invite my soul,
          I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.

          My tongue, every atom of my blood, form'd from this soil, this air,
          Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their
               parents the same,
          I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
          Hoping to cease not till death.¹⁷  (1 -- 9)
Those opening lines announce Whitman's American idealism and enthusiastic trust in the innate value of the individual.  The "I" or "myself" is sometimes personal but more often generic and cosmic.  The "you" creates an imperative relationship between poet and reader which continues through the poem. Whitman abandons the use of conventional figures and draws his symbolism from his experiences, which become our own via the flow and energy of his language.

The first edition of Leaves of Grass (1855) comprised 12 untitled poems, all of which contain long cadenced lines that resemble the unrhymed verse of the King James Bible.  The symbolic "I" in the longest poem, which Whitman later titled "Song of Myself," appears in "The Sleepers," in which the "I" symbolizes life, death and rebirth.

To compensate for the shocked response of reviewers, Whitman published anonymously several adulatory reviews and sent complimentary copies of Leaves of Grass to literati.  Emerson's prompt and positive response affirmed Whitman's vocation, but his enthusiasm cooled, however, when Whitman continued to emphasize the body as much as the soul and to identify the life force with the sexual impulse.  Nevertheless, Whitman maintained his independence and devoted his life to the organic expansion of his seminal work.

Stimulated by Emerson's letter of congratulations, Whitman rapidly compiled another edition (1856) with revisions and additions, the most significant being "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," in which the poet vicariously joins his readers and all past and future passengers on the ferry.  Whitman began to structure his poems by way of allegory for the third edition (1860).  In "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking," a mockingbird (the voice of nature) teaches a little boy (the future poet) on the coast of Long Island, New York, the meaning of death.  Italian opera, of which Whitman was fond, is the basis of the poem's musicality.  Two clusters of poems, "Children of Adam" and "Calamus," concern sexual love and male friendship.  Drum-Taps (1865, later added to the 1867 edition) reflects his awareness of the significance of the Civil War (1861 -- 1865) and his desire for reconciliation between North and South.  Sequel to Drum-Taps (1866) contains "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," one of four elegies for President Abraham Lincoln (1861 -- 1865), whose life and death become the central symbol of democracy in the 1867 edition.  Modern communications and transportation are symbols in "Passage to India" (1871), a transcendent vision of the unions of East and West and of the soul with God.  Whitman finally arranged his poems to his satisfaction for the 1881 edition, but he continued to add new poems until the final edition (1892).  A posthumous cluster, "Old Age Echoes," appeared in 1897.

Dickinson

Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson represent complementary aspects of Emerson's American poet: the democratic projection of the self into nature and city and the hermetic absorption of the world into oneself, respectively.  Adapting the quatrain of the hymnal, Dickinson recorded with unwavering attention the drama of consciousness.  Each lean poem concisely expresses, word by word, a single moment of perception and emotion; her work as a whole reveals the extremes of her experiences: God as present or absent, love as satisfaction or renunciation, nature as harmonious or alien.  The following poem (1896) is typical of her manner: the first act of consciousness is the recognition of an experience, after which the consciousness seeks completion either through its relation to the other--God, lover, nature--or through its own integration.

          I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
          And Mourners to and fro
          Kept treading--treading--till it seemed
          That Sense was breaking through--

          And when they all were seated,
          A Service, like a Drum--
          Kept beating--beating--till I thought
          My Mind was going numb--

          And then I heard them lift a Box
          And creak across my Soul
          With those same Boots of Lead, again,
          Then Space--began to toll,

          As all the Heavens were a Bell,
          And Being, but an Ear,
          And I, and Silence, some strange Race
          Wrecked, solitary, here--

          And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
          And I dropped down, and down--
          And hit a World, at every plunge,
          And Finished knowing--then--¹⁸

Her style is deceptively simple, marked by an economy of language; the voice is passionate, expressing sensory experience and psychological actualities with frankness and force.  The poem contains many modernist characteristics--intense imagery, ellipsis of thought, verbal ambiguity--and it predetermines the modern expansion of sonic texture via slant rhyme, consonance, and dissonance.

The contrast between Dickinson's style and Whitman's style is apparent.  And their techniques diametrically affect their audiences.  His long lines, irregular rhythm, and infrequent rhyme ease the audience; her short lines, metrical deviations, and variable rhymes unsettle the audience.  Dickinson condensed her lines via defamiliarization, a strategy that involved the use of common language in uncommon ways, such as intense metaphors and emphatic ellipses.  Her comparisons transcend physical resemblances and intimate complex emotions.  Most of Dickinson's poems formally resemble the quatrains of traditional Christian hymns, with two lines of four-beat meter alternating with two lines of three-beat meter.  But she managed manifold variations within her simple form--employing idiosyncratic syntax and punctuation, breaking subtly the rhythm, and disrupting end rhymes with slant rhymes--creating complex word puzzles which have been producing divergent interpretations.

Dickinson's early style exhibits the influences of George Herbert, John Keats, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Robert Browning.  Her handwritten lyrics imitated the formalities of print, and her poetic techniques were conventional.  Later, however, Dickinson began to attend to the visual aspects of her work, breaking and arranging lines of verse in ways to emphasize meaning and writing letters of the alphabet in lavish ways to stress or to alter a poem's sense.  She also incorporated cutouts from novels, magazines, and the Bible to augment her own use of language.

In the late 1850's, Dickinson began making copies of poems and binding them with thread into packets.  In 1862 Dickinson was sufficiently confident to write to the critic Thomas Wentworth Higginson, sending three poems and asking for advice.  He promptly replied with caution against publication, but that did not deter her from writing, for between 1862 and 1864, she composed 681 poems.  Although few of Dickinson's poems were published formally during her lifetime, she self-published nearly one-third of her poems, sending them in the more than 1,000 letters she had written to at least 100 different correspondents.  Though collections began to appear after her death, The Poems of Emily Dickinson (1955) and The Letters of Emily Dickinson (1958) assured her place as the only female among the seminal romantic poets.

Conclusion

It is important to note that the source of romanticism was the Sturm und Drang ("Storm and Stress") literary movement of the 1770's, when German poets rejected neoclassical poetics, specifically the adherence to rules of composition.  Neoclassicism (1660 -- 1785) and romanticism (1785 -- 1830) were diametric movements, the latter being an antithetical response to the former's preoccupation with rationalism, traditionalism, objectivism, decorum and humanism.

Francis Bacon's Advancement of Learning (1605), Rene Descartes' Discourse on Method (1637), Isaac Newton's Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (1687), and John Locke's "Essay Concerning Human Understanding" (1690) initiated a period of rational criticism, during which reason became scientific method.  The intellectuals of the Enlightenment advocated the application of the scientific method to the comprehension of all life.  All institutions and all systems of thought were subject to the rational, scientific way of thinking.  Thus, neoclassical poets regarded poetry as an art requiring a set of skills to achieve foreseen results.  Their method was to learn and to practice those techniques so that their works inconspicuously contained the essential properties of classical (Greek and Roman) literature.  Such properties were the reason classical literature had survived.  The neoclassical poets strove for correctness with respect to imitation and followed the established rules of their art.  The adherence to traditional forms--the couplet, which they closed--for example, meant that the poets were following the natural literary laws discovered by the ancients.

The paradox that conventional forms are closest to nature is resolved when one considers the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century interest in science.  Nature became the object of scrutiny: something to be observed, itemized, tested and understood so that it could be manipulated and used.  That attitude led many neoclassicists to believe that the dynamic processes in the natural world were in the human world.  Nature became truth in the sense that it held the ultimate meaning and value of human existence.  Human beings, especially those in the upper class, were regarded as the primary subject matter of literature.  Poets directed their attention to nature--that is, to human experience--and rendered their observations in ways which instructed and pleased their audience.  Although much neoclassical poetry is didactic, critical of conduct that threatened to undermine traditional social behavior, it is satirical.  The predilection for satire reveals a central ideal of neoclassical humanism: poetry is not art for art's sake; poetry is art for humanity's sake.

It is a mistake to describe the romantic poets as simply nature poets.  The presentation of an external scene is not for its own sake; rather, it is a stimulus for the poet to engage in thought.  Representative romantic poems are meditations that, though often stimulated by natural phenomena, focus on human experience.  But whereas neoclassical poetry is about other people, romantic poetry invites the audience to identify the speakers with the poets themselves, either directly or indirectly.  And whether the speakers are the poets themselves or other people, they are solitary figures engaged in a long, sometimes elusive, quest.  Often they are social nonconformists or outcasts.

Wordsworth's preface to Lyrical Ballads is a poetic manifesto in which he declares that good poetry is not a mirror, it is an imitation of humanity.  The source and content of a good poem, according to Wordsworth, are the strong emotions of the poet and/or external objects after they have been transformed by sentimental reminiscence.  The creative act, if a poem is to be genuine, must be unforced and free of the rules and conventions of neoclassical poetics.  Coleridge modified that theory and introduced an organic process: a poem is similar to a plant in that both evolve in accordance with their own internal principles into their final organic forms.

The romantics, especially the early romantics, did not disparage reason; they tried to balance reasoning with feeling and imagination.  To them the scientific method left no room for the imagination and for the soul.

The American romantics reacted similarly to the empirical revolution.  The basis of the transcendental movement was, as Emerson states in his lecture "The Transcendentalist" (1841), Immanuel Kant's transcendental idealism, a view that the form of our knowledge of reality derives from reason but its content comes from our senses.  Emerson, however, extended the concept of transcendental knowledge, in a way the validity of which Kant specifically had denied, to include an intuitive cognizance of moral and other truths that transcend the limits of sensory experience.

What the American romantics had in common was less what they proposed than what they were reacting against: formal religion, social conformity, materialism, and commercialism.  To counter dogmatic religion, Emerson advocated a faith in a divine Spirit or Principle or Soul in which both humanity and the cosmos participate.  That omnipresent Spirit manifests itself to human consciousness as influxes of inspiration, which are the source of profound truths and the necessary condition for moral and spiritual development.  The transcendental poets who accepted Emerson's epistemological ideal grounded their comprehension of reality in feeling and intuition, even when doing such led to contradictions.  Those poets also adopted an ethics of individualism that stressed self-trust, self-reliance and self-sufficiency.  And they turned their attention from contemporary society toward the natural world, which corresponded to the human spirit.
____________________________________________________
          ¹William Richey and Daniel Robinson, eds., Lyrical Ballads and Related Writings (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002) 395.
          ²William Blake, Blake's Selected Poems, eds. David and Virginia Erdman (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1995) 68.

          ³Richey and Robinson, 407.
          ⁴Ibid., 404.
          ⁵Ibid., 112-113.
          ⁶Ibid., 408.
          ⁷William Cullen Bryant published his romantic poem "Thanatopsis" in 1817.
          ⁸Brooks Atkinson, ed., The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: Random House, 2000) 13.
          ⁹Ibid., 689.
          ¹⁰Richey and Robinson, 422.
          ¹¹Ibid.
          ¹²Ibid., 420.

          ¹³Edgar Allen Poe, Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allen Poe (New York: Bantam Doubleday Dell, 1984) 742-743.
          ¹⁴Ibid., 738.
          ¹⁵Atkinson, 6.
          ¹⁶Francis Murphy, ed., Walt Whitman: The Complete Poems (New York: Penguin, 2004) 37.
          ¹⁷Ibid., 63.
          ¹⁸Thomas H. Johnson, ed., The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1961) 280.