SOURCE: Parrinder, Patrick. “Victorian Criticism: The Republic of Letters.” In Authors and Authority: English and American Criticism 1750-1990, pp. 134-139. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan, 1991.

In the following excerpt, originally published in 1977, Parrinder briefly discusses the critical theories associated with Emerson, Whitman, and Poe.

The Birth of American Criticism: Emerson, Whitman and Poe

‘A breath as of the green country,—all the welcomer that it is New-England country, not second-hand but first-hand country,—meets us wholesomely everywhere in these Essays’: these are the words of Carlyle, introducing the first collection of Ralph Waldo Emerson's writings to the English public in 1841. Throughout the nineteenth century, American authors could be very successfully incorporated into Victorian literary culture in terms such as these. Later in the century, what Santayana was to call the genteel tradition gave rise to a criticism that was avowedly provincial and to the migration of writers of...