ABSTRACT
America was a Romantic principle rich in remarkable landscape, new social feeling, distinctive and forward-looking political institutions, and the finest flower of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Poetry furnished with Indian squaws, heroes of the Revolution, prairies and katydids promptly appeared, but it was novel in subject matter, traditional in form. The Americans of the Revolutionary period had no doubt which was the most serious and necessary of the literary arts. American literature found itself caught between two contradictory claims: the need for literary independence and republican originality, and the hereditary tie for nourishing contact with the European cultural past. Americans often retaliated by puffing small talents into large reputations, as new nations do. To dignify the new society, classical forms remained remarkably durable in a public art seeking to represent the moral universality and democratic dignity of American ideals. American originality was to show itself in more popular forms: vaudeville, burlesque, minstrelsy, the Broadway musical and Hollywood motion picture.
