Major American Writers and Poets of the 19th and Early 20th Centuries

Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) was an American writer, editor, and literary critic. He served as editor of several literary journals, such as the Broadway Journal. He wrote poems, short stories, and literary criticism "The Poetic Principl"). He gathered some of his short stories in Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840). They deal with the fantastic, mystery, and horror. While reading Poe, you find strangeness in the beautiful, and it is evident in the setting. His plots take place in unspecified pasts and locations or invented geographies; intense subjectivism, conveyed by first-person perspective; extreme subjective states, where Poe's characters are usually nervous, mad, or hallucinating from drugs. In general, his characters are outsiders, extraordinary individuals. Some of his works are"The Black Ca" and"The Tell-Tale Hear".

Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman (1819-1892) is the most influential American poet. His main book is Leaves of Grass, but he expanded it by adding prose pieces and sections like"Calamu" and"Children of Ada". The book transcribes into poetry all facets of life in the country in an abstract and sophisticated way. His use of sexual imagery led him to be accused of obscenity, and he had to defend himself against such accusations in court. He invented free verse and called it"versicle" claiming that its unity was given by breathing. He also twisted language beyond recognition, to the point of dissolving"natural syntax" He is one of the first poets to write about modern phenomena. He is the"father of modern poetry"

Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson's (1830-1886) poetry is often a"self-portrait" Her main themes are the awareness of death; a strong sense of difference (psychological rather than social); natural impressions, descriptions of animals and natural phenomena; psychological states (melancholy); the passing of time; and social and psychological confinement. Her style is relatively simple, often allegorical with elliptical syntax and short meters. She published seven poems during her lifetime, out of nearly two thousand she wrote. She was a main representative of mid-century American poetry and unconventional from her contemporaries.

Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound (1885-1972) started writing imagist poetry, producing hard images and juxtapositions. However, his poems stopped being imagist since he was always interested in the past, and thus, he was the father of the translations and adaptations movement. This new tendency was reflected in his book Cathay, which is an adaptation of a collection of Chinese poems.

He wrote a long poem called Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, made up of different parts of Pound's life in London when he met many people, complaining about the world, society, and the city, modernity, commercial values, etc., and the suffering of the world with this sick civilization. He always maintains a pessimistic view and complains that art has no place in this modern society. However, it is interesting how it is written: allusive, containing many metaphors on these topics, extremely dense language, etc.

T.S. Eliot

T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) was a great expert on metaphysical poetry and empirical and rationalist writing. He was many things simultaneously: a scholar, poet, dramatist, literary critic, editor, etc. From his early work, we can highlight poems such as Prufrock (his first one), Love Song, and The Waste Land, which is his most famous poem but also allusive, complicated, and difficult to follow.

As a dramatist, he stood out with plays such as Family Reunion; however, they did not have the same success as his poems. Besides, he wrote important critiques about Elizabethan drama, dealing with political and social issues. He considered the basic problem of modernity the dissociation of sensibility, and he also saw technology as the key to social isolation, with people being lost in modernity, and the solution being art.