Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

We need to go back a bit. American poetry was inaugurated by Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1836. There had, of course, been poetry written in America before 1836 – by William Cullen Bryant, say, or John Greenleaf Whittier, or Edgar Allen Poe – but it wasn't until Emerson declared America's cultural independence in 1836 with his anonymously published essay Nature that the possibility, one might say the project, of American poetry was born. As he put it, at the beginning of his essay, Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? … The sun shines to-day also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship. ( Emerson 2001 : 27) The “eyes” here, the “eyes” through which “we,” the Americans, behold “God” and “nature” are, from one point of view, British. Emerson, in other words, in inaugurating American literature was, in “Nature” and other essays of the late 1830s and 1840s, formulating a question that American poets would be asking themselves long into ... log in or subscribe to read full text