Unit 3: From Romanticism to Realism

Unit 3: From Romanticism to Realism, starts this unit off about how slavery is tearing nations apart. Writers such as Henry David Thoreau and Nathaniel Hawthorne write about the incident concerning John Brown in which he led a raid for slavery, both of these writers had different opinions on this. The Civil War was one of the many reasons where great writing came from, thanks to Abraham Lincoln the Emancipation Proclamation and Thirteenth Amendment he was able to end slavery. Later in that time, writing became more truthful with itself, a new style called realism, would appear. Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson were two of the many poets who challenged themselves. Poetry to them was about their personal feeling, Whitman however wrote in free verse, unconfined by formal patterns of rhyme and meter. Dickinson believed in traditional poetic forms to which she wrote about love, death, and nature. The literary time for the Civil War encouraged many soldiers and families to write, including diaries and letters. Overall I believe that realism took over romanticism ever since the war, it shaped new ideas for the poetic minds. Creating poetic structure, traditional, epic, run-on and so many more.