3. Beginning of American Poetry

Instructions: 

Listen to the lecture, read the theory and the texts to be ready to answer the questions in the class.

Points to remember:

 Fireside poets or Schoolroom poets as they were often anthologized and they were the main American poets taught at schools. They mainly concentrated on common, known things that would appeal to a wide audience. Their poetry was thus not original in themes but in its form. 

Major representatives: William Cullen Bryant, John Greenleaf Whittier, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes and James Russell Lowell. 

The major American poets of the late nineteenth century, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Edgar Alan Poe rebelled against the didacticism and formal conventions of the mid-century Fireside Poets.