ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book presents the Romantic poets as a particularly strong and purposeful reader of North American travels. Ethnographical and anthropological material concerning Native Americans was the mainstay of reviews and a principal talking point for private readers, but, as the United States continued its bewilderingly rapid growth and development, the separate identity of European Americans and their relative capacities and status vis-à-vis the British, also became a major preoccupation for readers. In broad terms, the heavy indebtedness of Romantic poets to the literature of travel and exploration might be explained as serving purposes either of authentication or enrichment. In both cases, by contrast with the better-known phenomena of intrapoetic allusion, the seeming imperative that readers be aware of the source material explains the popularity of the prose footnote providing references and, frequently, quoted extracts.
