Historic Context

Writing in the War Years

The Confederacy is represented in verse by Henry Timrod (1828-67) and Paul Hamilton Hayne (1830-86). Had not the war shaken their health and devastated their region, they might have achieved more.

Sidney Lanier (1842-81) is the most interesting Southern poet of the period. He is best known for his musical verse, such as The Song of the Chattahoochee (1883), and for poems of vague mysticism, such as The Marshes of Glynn (1878).

The most memorable northern writing of the war years came from the pen of Abraham Lincoln (1809-65). The prairie president had earlier shown his mastery of the art of compelling argument. In his wartime utterances he rose to new heights. The Gettysburg Address and his second inaugural address are prose of haunting beauty.

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) and Walt Whitman are considered the two most gifted, though completely different poets in American literature. Like Whitman, Dickinson was influenced by the writings of American author Ralph Waldo Emerson, but while Whitman expressed early Emerson’s vast optimism, in her verses, Dickinson expressed Emerson's late pessimism. The lyrics by Dickinson are short, compressed, rhymed, and metrical; whereas Whitman's lines, in free verse, are loose, unrhymed and somewhat diffuse. There is another difference as well: whereas Whitman had his poetic fingers on the nation's pulse, Emily Dickinson lived in a world not much larger than the garden of her father's house in Amherst, Mass. The world of her imagination, however, was as vast as the universe. In tight, rhyming hymn meters she wrote of the nature she knew intimately, of love, and of the ultimate questions of death and immortality.

The Age of Realism (1871-1913)

The Civil War was a harsh experience. In addition to enduring the pain and sorrow of war, Americans were shocked by the threat to the nation itself. They realized that democracy was not an inevitable system of government; it could fail, though it had survived the test of the Civil War. However, even after the war ended, the American democracy still had to face the problems arising from corruption in Washington, D.C., from growing industrialism, which moved people from farms to cities and led to bitter quarrels between workers and employers, and from increased immigration and westward expansion.

These problems and disappointments were perplexing. No longer could men look to the future with complete optimism. Instead of praising democracy as a system, Americans were urged to look critically at their society and work hard to keep it healthy. In short, postwar conditions prompted the people to view their world directly and honestly, without romantic aspirations.

The Civil War changed the USA dramatically. Business boomed after the War. War production had boosted industry in the North and given it prestige and political value. It also gave industrial leaders valuable experience in the management of men and machines. The enormous natural resources – iron, coal, oil, gold, and silver – speeded up business development. The new intercontinental rail system, started in 1869, and the transcontinental telegraph, which began operating in 1861, gave industry access to materials, markets and communications. The constant influx of immigrants provided a seemingly endless supply of inexpensive labor. Over 23 million foreigners – Germans, Scandinavians and Irish in the early years, and increasingly Central and Southern Europeans thereafter – flowed into the USA between 1860 and 1910. Chinese and Japanese contract laborers were imported by Hawaiian plantation owners, railroad companies, and other American businesses on the West Coast.

The structure of working population in America also changed. In 1860, most Americans lived on farms or in small villages, but by 1919 half of the population was concentrated in 12 major cities. Urbanization and industrialization brought about new problems: poor and overcrowded housing, unsanitary conditions, low pay (called "“age slavery"), difficult working conditions and inadequate restraints on business. Labor unions grew, and strikes informed the nation of the plight of the working people. Farmers, too, saw themselves struggling against “money interests” of the East, the so-called ‘robber barons’ like J.P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller. The eastern banks tightly controlled mortgages and credit so vital to western development and agriculture, while railroad companies charged high prices to transport farm products to the cities. The farmer, who used to be regarded by the Romantics as the wise man and natural aristocrat gradually became an object of ridicule, lampooned as a “hick” and a simpleton. Before the war, the Romantics defended human rights, especially the abolition of slavery. After the war, Americans increasingly romanticized progress and the self-made man. The ideal American of the post-Civil War period became the millionaire manufacturer and the speculator: in 1860, there were fewer than 100 millionaires; by 1875, there were more than 1,000. Darwinian evolution and the “survival of the fittest” seemed to justify the methods of successful business tycoons.

From 1860 to 1914 the United States was transformed from a small, young, agricultural ex-colony into a huge modern industrialized nation. A debtor nation in 1860, by 1914 it had become the world’s wealthiest state, with the population that had more than doubled, rising from 31 million in 1860 to 76 million in 1900. By World War I the US had become a major world power.

As industrialization grew, so did alienation. Historical documents of the period depict the damage of economic forces and alienation on a weak and vulnerable individual. The most valuable qualities that could guarantee survival in the new America included inner strength, flexibility and, above all, individual independence.

Дата добавления: 2014-01-11