William Cullen Bryant

 
INDIVIDUALS: NEW VISIONS OF AMERICA
 
Poe, Hawthorne and Melville all struggled to find their individual voices, and 
through them American literature began to acquire its own personality. One more figure 
emerged in the 1850s to assert a truly American voice, one that celebrated the American 
landscape, the American people, their speech and democratic form of government. His 
name was 
Walt Whitman
(1819-1892), and like so many other of these writers, he had 
had to work hard for a living as a schoolteacher, printer and journalist. In 1848, he took 
a trip to the southern city of New Orleans, at the mouth of the Mississippi River, that 
great waterway flowing through the heart of the country. There Whitman gained a new 

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vision of America and began writing poetry that would embody this vision. In 1855, he 
published a ground-breaking book called “
Leaves of Grass
”
.
Readers were amazed by 
the free-flowing structure of this poetry, with its long irregular lines. Like Melville in 
“
Moby Dick”,
Whitman ventured beyond traditional forms to meet his need for more 
space to express the American spirit. Some readers were disturbed by Whitman’s 
egotism (one main poem in “
Leaves of Grass” 
is called “Song of Myself”), but 
Whitman dwelt on himself simply because he saw himself as a prototype of “The 
American.” The subject material ranges from the particular to the universal, from the 
intimate to the cosmic, the theme of self-realization being central to Whitman’s sense of 
purpose. Startling as this poetry was, it won Whitman admirers across America and in 
Europe. Throughout the rest of his life, he kept rewriting and republishing editions of 
“
Leaves of Grass”.
He celebrated a sweeping panorama of the American landscape 
and sang almost mystically of the rhythms of life uniting all citizens of the democracy. 
While prose fiction in the United States was developing in vital and imaginative 
ways, poetry seemed to recede as an art form. The poetic giants, Longfellow and 
Whitman, both died in the 1880s, as did two poets who have been admired by later 
generations, but who were barely known while they lived. One was southerner 
Sidney 
Lanier
(1842-1881), who mourned the romantic ideal of the “Old South,” which he felt 
had been shattered by the Civil War. Lanier held strong theories about poetry’s 
relationship to music, and his rhythmic, singing verse reminded many people of the 
poetry of Edgar Allan Poe.
The other unrecognized poet was 
Emily Dickinson
(1830-1886), a shy, brilliant 
New England woman who lived almost as a recluse in her family home. After a batch of 
her poems were rejected by one editor, she wrote only for herself, or sent verses as gifts 
to friends and relatives. They were typically short, reflective poems, with regular meter 
and rhyme and fresh, closely observed images. Although at first they appear to be 
traditional love poems or religious meditations, upon closer reading Dickinson’s poems 
reveal a religious skepticism and psychological shrewdness that is surprisingly modern.
Emily Dickinson was one of the first writers whose work can be seen as 
inherently American. Two of her great themes are eternity and the moment of death, and 
her use of dashes gives us a visual sense of the gap between the worlds and emphasizes 
the endlessness of infinity. She wrote over 1.700 poems, which were discovered after 
her death.