It seems as though whenever there are complications within a nation, whether its going to war or experiencing a depression, there is a blooming of the arts. Whether its music, painting or literature there has been a pattern within history that people turn to the arts as an outlet of either comfort or creativity when hard times are present. Yet, during the 1860's when the Civil War began there seemed to be no sign of innovation. It is perceived that when a country has no cultural identity, when it fails to revolutionize its culture to stand out from other countries, it begins to feel a sort of "cultural inferiority", and during the civil war this is exactly what Americans began to feel.
The American people read a great deal of the war while it was happening, but writing had seemed to completely halt. It wasn't until about 2 years into the war that Sir Walter Scott said "the poet in America is not going to be a European poet who’s bound by metrical regularity. The poet in the U.S. doesn't have to write in iambic pentameter. The poet in America doesn't have to rhyme. Why should we be hung up with those European conventions that are really kind of imprisoning and constricting? The American poet will". Through this quote the author was saying that just by describing what is merely around them, the Americans will begin to write something completely different from the rest of the world. After this was written in Scott's essay and mass published, there began to be a shift in writing. American writers seemed to be doing exactly what Scott had suggested, to the point where they almost copied his writings. But this is the push that Americans needed. Slowly popular authors began to re-read influential books such as Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe to regain inspiration for this realistic writing. This realistic type for writing would set the writing tone for century's to come. Sources: http://www.humanitiestexas.org/news/articles/how-civil-war-transformed-american-literature-talk-randall-fuller
http://dcc.newberry.org/collections/literature-of-the-american-civil-war
You could say that the frequent lack of set form in American literature reflected a fundamental cultural difference between the New World and Old. Americans never really liked to conform, and the arts liked to reflect that. However, many American writers followed forms and achieved great success, like Langston Hughes and his sonnets during the Harlem Renaissance.
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