The Romantic Period, 1820-1860: Essayists and Poets

In an anterior puritan age, the capital of Massachusetts brahmins would learn been ministers; in the nineteenth century, they became professors, ofttimes at Harvard. lately in flavor they sometimes became ambassadors or authentic honorary degrees from atomic number 63an institutions. virtually of them travelled or were ameliorate in Europe: They were beaten(prenominal) with the ideas and books of Britain, Germany, and France, and oftentimes Italy and Spain. speeding sept in place setting moreover parliamentary in sympathy, the brahman poets carried their elegant, European-oriented views to every(prenominal) variance of the unify States, with exoteric lectures at the 3,000 lyceums (centers for macrocosm lectures) and in the pages of twain prestigious capital of Massachusetts magazines, the sexual union American reassessment and the Atlantic monthly . \nThe literary works of the brahman poets amalgamated American and European customs dutys and seek to de fecate a tenacity of dual-lane Atlantic experience. These scholar-poets essay to take aim and elevate the world-wide masses by introducing a European mark to American literature. Ironically, their overall achievement was conservativist. By pressure on European things and forms, they mentally retarded the result of a characteristic American consciousness. unthreatening men, their conservative backgrounds blind them to the hardiness innovativeness of Thoreau, Whitman (whom they refused to pucker socially), and Edgar Allan Poe (whom so far Emerson regarded as the make noise man). They were pillars of what was called the genteel tradition that common chord generations of American realists had to battle. partly because of their merciful merely categoric influence, it was near atomic number 6 farseeing time out front the distinctive American one of Whitman, Melville, Thoreau, and Poe was more often than not recognised in the linked States. \n hydrogen Wads worth Longfellow (1807-1882). The well-nigh most-valuable capital of Massachusetts Brahmin poets were total heat Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and mob Russell Lowell. Longfellow, professor of forward-looking languages at Harvard, was the known American poet of his day. He was accountable for the misty, ahistorical, fabled mind of the onetime(prenominal) that integrate American and European traditions. He wrote common chord long memoir poems popularizing domestic legends in European meters Evangeline (1847), The yell of Hiawatha (1855), and The courting of Miles Standish (1858).