ABSTRACT
The eventual divergence from the social orientation of ideas is, of course, one of the later Romantic inclinations, with which we are familiar in Europe. It is much more central to Romanticism than many of the qualities popularly associated with it: belief in human perfectibility, description of antiquities and natural beauty, even the picturesque attractions of solitude. There is a more complete reference to Cooper than to Edgar Allan Poe in the eighteenth-century solidarity of outlook whose evolution has been described in the preceding pages. It is convenient, however, to take Poe first. Finally, Poe very largely settled the path of American fiction in the Romantic, not, as in England, the Augustan, tradition. With apparently very much the same acceptance of the observed fact as having a self-sufficing reality, Poe applied Defoe's technique of establishing authenticity, assembling and manipulating his imagined facts and figures.
