Poetry of the United States

The history of the poetry of the United States is deeply related to the history of the American nation itself, its conflicts, its wars, and of its economic and social evolutions. American poetry emerges truly in the literature of English language during the colonial time, when the the United States are still British territories. The poetry of this period, written by the first colonists, is for a major part borrows Puritanisme on the one hand, and also aspires to the Démocratie and the Liberté on the other hand, using traditional models of the English Poésie as regards form, of diction, and subject. It is only during the 19th century that starts to affirm a clean American style. From the end of the 19th century, whereas Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson gains in popularity by techniques particular stylistics which affirm a clean American poetic identity, the American poets start to take a lead in the front of the scene of the English Littérature. This avant-gardism poetic American is confirmed at the 20th century, insofar as Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot were probably the most influential poets of English language of the period during the First World War.

Until the end of the 20th century, the interest carried to American poetry diversified, in the sense that the interest of the academics went on the poetry of female origin, Afro-américain social E, Hispanic, and other groups. Poetry, and creation written in general, tend to change with the emergence and the multiplication of programmes of creative writing in the American universities.

Poetry in the colonies

One of the first poétesses of the British colonies known is Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672), which remains, moreover, one of the first poetesses of English language. Its poems are tender and original evocations of its family life, its life with the hearth, and love which it tests for her husband. In a different register, Pasteur Edward Taylor (1645-1729) wrote poems expressing the puritan virtues on a stylistic mode metaphysical strongly worked, and its poetry can be regarded as typical of the beginning of the colonial time. This print of the Puritanism and the Morale on the poetry of then is one of the major characteristics of the poetry of the colonies during XVIIe and the beginning of the 18th century.

Another essential figure of the colonial time is Phillis Wheatley, a slave whose book Poems one Various Subjects, Religious and Moral was published in 1773. It is one of the most known poétesses at its time, at least in the colonies, and its poems were characteristic of the culture of the Nouvelle England of then, reflecting religious and artistic ideas.

The 18th century and the upheavals which America knew are as many subjects of inspiration for its poets. The poetic writings are worked by the events which knows the the United States, the war of Independence, the Esclavagisme, Amerindian S, the American Civil War, the influence of the religion and the Bible. This is for example visible in works of Phillip Freneau, which remains famous for sympathy, with against current of conventions of the time, that he testifies in his writings for the natives to America.

Generally, the development of poetry in the colonies is the reflection of the development of the colonies itself. This incipient poetry, initially, is dominated by the need for preserving the integrity of the puritan ideals which worked the colonies. Whereas the colonists are done increasingly many, their poetry is marked more and more by their desire of independence.

This expansion of topics evoked by poetry is not on the other hand at all accompanied by an evolution by the kinds and poetic styles even, which remain very preserving, traditional, to see minor. This can be partly explained by the consequence of the immigration of the American poets, and their disconnection of the center of the London poetic life. Even at the end of the colonial period, this poetry is generally technically obsolete, employing the means and methods traditional and obsolete of Alexander Pope and Thomas Gray, in full emergence of the English romanticism with William Blake and Robert Burns.

Post-colonial poetry

The first major poets of the independent United States are William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878), whose principal contribution was poems with the free and rhapsodic style on the vastness of the meadows and drills. One can also count among the emerging famous poets of this beginning of 19th century Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882), John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892), Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894), Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), James Russell Lowell (1819-1891), and Sidney Lanier (1842-1881). What joins together the work of these post-colonial poets is their will to affirm an American voice distinct from that of their British compatriots. For this reason, they explored the regions and the traditions of their country of origin and were useful about it like source of inspiration for their poetry.

The most significant example of this will is the poem the Song of Hiawatha of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, published in 1855. This poem draws its references of stories and Amerindian tales gathered in a work of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, person in charge of the Indian businesses for Michigan of 1836 to 1841. Longfellow also borrowed from the Finnish epopee Kalevala its meter rhythmic, for probably dissociating British models. The poem, although very great popular success, however did not constitute a stylistic model for the future American poets.

One of the other major distinctions of the American poets their British contemporaries is the influence of the transcendantalism of the poets and philosophical Emerson and Thoreau. The transcendantalism is during American of the English romanticism initiated by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. During its youth, Emerson, more than whoever founder of the current transcendantalist, became acquainted with the two poets, like that of Thomas Carlyle, at the time of a voyage in Europe. While the Romantisme softened in the victorianism of England victorienne, this one on the contrary vigorously developed in America of the Années 1830 until the American Civil War.

Edgar Allan Poe is probably the American poet more recognized out of the borders of the United States during this period. Various writers, in France, Sweden and Russia, were strongly influenced by its work, and its poem the Corbel was a success in all the Europe, and was translated in many languages.

An American idiom

The true emergence of a typically American poetic kind, freed from the European influence, is due to the work of two poets, Walt Whitman (1819-1892) and Emily Dickinson (1830-1886). Seemingly, these two poets cannot be opposite any more. The long worms of Walt Whitman, directly inspired length of the rate/rhythm of the worms of the Bible of the king Jacques , and his democratic political sensibility, are in total opposition with the style of Emily Dickinson, of its dense and concise poetry, made short sentences inspired of the Hymne S Protestant. What them dregs is their relation with Emerson (Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote a letter of congratulations in Whitman which was published in the first edition of Leaves off Fatty ), and a style avant-gardist in comparison with the originality of their vision. One can thus affirm that these two poets represent the birth of two major American poetic idioms - the use of the free Verse and the expression of the emotions in a raw and direct way at Whitman, and irony and aphorisms of Dickinson -, idioms which will deeply mark the American poetry of the 20th century.

This new poetic style and typically American spread themselves and remain then through the work of various poets, of which Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935), Stephen Crane (1871-1900), Robert Frost (1874-1963) and Carl Sandburg (1878-1967). Consequently, the foundations of a new American poetic language were clearly visible at this beginning of 20th century.

Modernism at the Second world war

This American kind, associated with an attentive study of the French poetry of the 19th century, constitutes the bases founders of the poetic modernism of English language of the 20th century. Ezra Pound (1885-1972) and T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) are the emblematic figures of this time, although good number of other poets contributed significantly during this period, of which Gertrude Stein (1874-1946), Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), William Carlos Williams (1883-1963), Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) (1886-1961), Marianne Moore (1887-1972), E.E. Cummings (1894-1962), and Hart Cranium (1899-1932). William Carlos Williams became an exemplary reference for many poets who followed in the fact that it has, more than whoever of his pars, contributed to marry at the same time the American language and the free versification.

Whereas the majority of these poets fit closely or by far in the modernistic or post-modernistic currents, other major American poets of the beginning of the 20th century are not associated at all there. The majority of the latter fit in what one will call later the New Criticism. John Crowe Ransom (1888-1974), Allen Touches (1899-1979), and Robert PEN Warren (1905-1989) is these. Other major poets of this period, such as for example Archibald MacLeish (1892-1982), tried out the modernistic poetic techniques, but also turned to more traditional techniques of writing.

See

List of American poets

Sources

Article partly translated according to

Random links:

Gurû | Season NFL 1927 | Potemkine (armoured) | Daniel Hipkiss | Déclarations_de_sinistre_fausses