In 1842, Emerson called for the emergence of a poet worthy of the new America—a fresh voice with limitless passion and originality. Two poets who began writing in the middle of the century arguably met this challenge: Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. Although their lives outwardly were very dissimilar, both Whitman and Dickinson wrote poems that broke with the traditional conventions of poetic form and content. In this way they followed the transcendentalist ideals of individuals discovering the truth through intuition and following their own beliefs. Not all American Romantics were optimistic or had faith in the innate goodness of humankind, however. Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville are what have been called “brooding” romantics or “anti-transcendentalists.” Their stories are characterized by a probing of the inner life of their characters, and examination of the complex and often mysterious forces that motivate human behavior. These stories are romantic, however, in their emphasis on emotion, nature, the individual, and the unusual.

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