Abstract

In this dissertation, I argue that early nineteenth-century American poets’ and readers’ interpretations of Romanticism shaped their understanding of the role poetry and its producers could play in a developing national culture. By examining the public careers and private sentiments of four male poets — William Cullen Bryant, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Edgar Allan Poe, and Jones Very — I analyze how each reconciled poetic vocation with the moral and economic obligations associated with the attainment of manhood. I locate these poets and their critics within specific historical discourses of aesthetic reception and production, focusing on the tensions and overlaps between Scottish Common-sense and Romantic aesthetic thought. Finally, I suggest that as a career objective the production of poetry paralleled rather than opposed the middle-class project of the “self-made man.” The effortful self-mastery urged upon young men by prescriptive writers was echoed in critics’ assessments of American poets’ works. Both the male poet and the self-made man operated within discourses which stressed imperatives — do, be, act — without specific objects. Yet, for aspiring poets, Romantic emphases on spontaneous composition and emotional expressiveness made deliberate craftsmanship irrelevant to poetic production. By identifying poetic production as spontaneous and as the highest form of disinterested intellectual labor, antebellum American critics and poets alike obscured the actual work involved in poetry writing. This erasure of conscious literary labor separated effort from its products, replacing a poet’s personal motives for writing poetry with the more nebulous goal of service, to be achieved through evidently inspired transcription than through purposeful composition. The title ‘poet’ suggested devotion to higher, more abstract goals, above mere commodity production. Each of these poets’ careers show how ambition compelled aspiring American poets to justify their work while disclaiming their individual hopes for their poetry and their reputations. Each poet promoted an understanding of poetic labor that demanded just such disclaimers. By underscoring the insubstantial and all but effortless nature of poetic composition itself, all four of these poets contributed to an enfeebled definition of the male poet — as a man who received impressions rather than produced them, and who observed rather than acted.