The
Transitional
Poets
"The Civil War was a transitional period for writers of the day. Poets, former slaves, famous public figures, and everyday people all contributed their ideas as the country and its literature moved from romanticism to realism.
In 1842, when the conflicts leading to the Civil War were just beginning to brew and the romantic movement was going strong, writer Ralph Waldo Emerson issued a challenge to America. The nation needed a poet worthy of itself-a truly fresh voice with limitless passion and originality. "I look in vain," lamented Emerson, "for the poet whom I describe. We do not with sufficient plainness, or sufficient profoundness, address ourselves to life...." In the corning decades, two poets would answer Emerson's bold call: Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. Outwardly, Whitman and Dickinson had little in common. Whitman, big, bearded, and outspoken, was always in the thick of things and wrote many poems about current issues and events, from the sad plight of the slave to the shocking assassination of President Lincoln. Dickinson, on the other hand, was shy and reclusive, living her whole life in her native New England, and finding inspiration for her poetry in her own thoughts. The two, however, were not entirely unalike. Both felt hemmed in by conventional ideas of how poems ought to look and what poems ought to say. Both wrote poetry so radical in form and content that it took many years for readers to appreciate it. (In Dickinson's case, appreciation didn't come until after her death.) Together, they broke poetry wide open, creating the most remarkable work of the Civil War era." |
(jmlarsen.pbworks.com)
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