The Lyric in Transit

This paper examines transformations in poetic discourses in the nineteenth-century, drawing from Emerson’s “The Poet” and Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. I particularly compare representations of time in notions of meter... [ view full abstract ]

This paper examines transformations in poetic discourses in the nineteenth-century, drawing from Emerson’s “The Poet” and Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. I particularly compare representations of time in notions of meter and verse in the mid-nineteenth century to consider shifting notions of national culture. While Emerson’s call for a national poetic form is one of the most influential of the period, I contend that at the heart of the emergence of a new notion of poetry is a fraught tension between the political present and past.  In particular, I retrieve how Emerson draws upon the native past to authenticate a claim to American poetry.