Not that our poets have been wholly without a philosophy of criticism; though it is significant that the most subtle and sympathetic understanding of the poetic temperament, of its function as well as its perils, is to be found, not in the writings of any maker of verses but in those of a novelist, Hawthorne--for example, in “The House of Seven Gables” and “The Great Stone Face.” Yet Bryant read, meditated, and wrote upon the art of poetry; Poe thought somewhat, if not deeply, upon it; Lanier made a worthy contribution to the science of meter; Longfellow was conversant with the literature of criticism; and Emerson’s stimulating essay on “The Poet,” while it may not have been the sort of medicine that our men of letters most needed, has doubtless exerted a wholesome influence. In Poe’s day, several magazines were discussing the principles of imaginative composition. However, an “Art of Poetry” like Timrod’s (published in _The Atlantic Monthly_ for September, 1905) could lie for forty years in manuscript, without exciting any strong suspicion of its value; and in the long run there has been an amazing disproportion between the slender thread of fundamental tradition and sound critical theory on the one hand, and the swollen and rapid stream of naïve, uncultivated verse, gathering from every quarter, on the other. Whatever English poets furnished the models, the imitation was largely on the surface. First Pope and his successors in England, then Wordsworth and Coleridge, then Shelley and Keats, and Scott and Bryon, and subsequently Tennyson,--all had in turn their American devotees. But there seems to have been relatively little understanding like that of Bryant and Timrod for the conscious theory underlying the “experiments” in “Lyrical Ballads,” or for the ideal demands which Shelley laid upon poetry and poets; nor did cisatlantic readers of Lord Byron much concern themselves about that Longinus whom he studied “o’er a bottle,” or for the structural frame upon which was reared Tennyson’s “Palace of Art.” =Characteristics of the Period.=--Of course in the following pages we shall deal as briefly as possible with those American poets in the last century who are touched to any great extent by strictures like these; for a history of literature is bound to treat as far as may be of writers that have made a wise use of tradition, and whose native insight has enabled them to train their genius in accordance with universal canons of art, and with a due appreciation of masterly technique. Meanwhile we may attempt to summarise the characteristics of the poetical era under consideration, and, in particular, of the earlier rather than the latter half of that era. The nearer we advance toward our own day, the wiser it is to refrain from general characterisation.