Abstract
In the troubled political and social period of our country, those years Just preceding the Civil War, a new and startling change was entering into our background of literature and poetry. John Greenleaf Whittier, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, William Cullen Bryant and James Russell Lowell were the leading poets of the period. Bret Harte with his new life of local color for the short story was growing to young manhood, The literature of the United States was in what might be termed its Golden Age. The new type of poetry, entering just at this time was in keeping with the ago, but was not accepted quickly. |Walt Whitman, the forerunner of the new era in poetry was not to be considered, except by a few close friends and a few liberal-minded readers, as a poet to rank with his many famed contemporaries. His works were too new and too strange, they followed too closely the brewing, outbreak and adjustment of the Civil War to be accepted quickly. Until his death, no real fame ever came to Whitman, yet he continued to write his poetry till the year of his death.