Short Essay On American Literature

and Porcelaine. (qtd. in Ruland and Bradburry 54)
Adams shrewdly realized that literary development of the new nation is a time consuming progress that needs three generations; the first generation involved with political and military issues, the second with science and economics and the third with art and literature. This idea can be compared to ideas Whitman expressed in his Democratic Vista. The period between the Revolution and the 1820s belonged to the first generation. In that period on national construction, the new nation was engaged in political and military issues. It is not surprising that no great literature is produced in that inappropriate age for creative imagination. In that era of early nationalism the cry for “declaration of literary independence” and a “truly American

The argument for an "American literature" was grounded on nationalist principles developed in Europe by Herder (1744-1803) and Madame de Stael (1766-1817). “Much of this sensibility was Romantic, insisting that the arts were born from the spirit of the people, the power of their traditions, their distinctive institutions, their folk and popular past” (62). American poetry was still in its beginning phase; while its subject matter was novel, its form was traditional (64). Although many American writers believed that they had enough American materials for their poems, some writers were dissatisfied with the lack of such materials in the country. In 1828 James Fenimore Cooper, expatriate to Paris for seven years, criticized American “poverty of materials”; in 1860, Nathaniel Hawthorne, expatriate to England and ltaly, found the origin of European romance in the decay of land; and as late as 1873 Henry James, expatriate in Britain for most of his life, wrote in The Madonna of the Future, “We are the disinherited of art!”