2 - Early narrative and lyric

Summary

Although comic verses were widely reprinted in newspapers, and neoclassical verse was still used regularly on ceremonial occasions – college commencement exercises, Phi Beta Kappa Society meetings – most serious American poets in the early nineteenth century wrote narratives, lyrics, or contemplative verses: religious poems of praise or confession in the style of Herbert's “Temple” or Donne's Holy Sonnets; elegiac quatrains modeled on Gray's; hymns in the style of Cowper; blank-verse meditations like Night Thoughts or like Tintern Abbey. The size of the United States and the primitive state of its transportation system meant that poets often wrote in isolation from one another and were chiefly influenced by whatever books their family, college, or town libraries happened to supply. Although many young writers eagerly read reviews of new books of poetry in the great British quarterlies, to which college literary societies often subscribed, obtaining the books themselves was difficult. A bookseller in Philadelphia might issue a pirated edition of Wordsworth, but how would a poet in western Massachusetts learn of its existence, except by chance? An edition of Shelley's poems might be picked up by a young minister in Boston and reviewed in the magazine he edited in Louisville, but Carolinians or Georgians would be none the wiser. Cultural life in the United States was haphazard, random, a matter of luck and chance encounters – though for that reason still full of excitement that residents of British or European cities might never know. Stumbling upon a single book could change a life, and giving or lending books to someone else was a sign of high esteem.