Walt Whitman

One can identify the beginning of the American poetry with the efforts of the XVIIth century puritans to make poems in a world dedicated to the sentence that «man cannot really make nothing» . Puritans did not hate literature or arts in general as philosophy, political theory, history were all to be valued but to the degree that they might be means of searching out nature and discovering fate. Their obligation was to search God’s Scriptures for evidence of his way with them, to live according to well established canons, to study themselves in their world.

The puritan rather «feared» literature in the sense that it might like them too much and that might therefore veer from the straight path he knew he must follow.His duties were clear and did not allow him to exercise his talents for poetry, except as such exercise might strengthen him in performing his duties.Therefore a certain simplicity can be observed, a simplicdity which derives from the American poet’s compulsion to justify his existence as a poet.This can be observed in a quote from Cotton Mather’s Manuductio ad Ministerium :

“Beware of a boundless and sickly appetite for the reading of the reading of the poems which now the rickety nation swarnes withal; and let not the Circaean cup intoxicate you ( .) Be not so set upon poetry, as to be always poring on the pssionate and measured pages.”

New England Puritans dedicated themselves to a life of the mind and spirit and to a logic according to which that life developped.As critics say, it seems that they guided themselves by the logic of Peter Ramus, logic which demonstrated how a single man might, through rigorous exercise of his God-given powers, observe, think, come to unerstand the nature of his world, as well as his place in it.Thus the key words of the Ramist logic were «inventoin», «laying open to view»;still, all this has been pushed to extremes and the poem started to examine and state in order to argue the truth of something.

Another important aspect of the Puritan poerty to be mentioned here is the problem of antinomianism which was central in Puritan’s conceptions of the limits put upon his freedom as an individual.The Antinomian controversy in 1634 and the problem raised by Anne Hutchinson showed true aspects towards which the Puritan social and religious way of life pointed out. She declared that man needed no evidence of his being of the Elect except that which he could get in direct communion with God; at the same time, the elect were subject to no laws or institutions except those which were in accord with the dictates of their own consciences. Thus, he could just accept the fact that everything depends upon God and that he, as an individual, could do something or not.This can be seen in the Puritan poems and one can say that the Puritan created poems but “he did his best to make them in such a way that he could declare- if anyone thought to ask him- that he had really not made them”

In this respect we cannot ignore history and the whole context in which American poetry had developped. The history of the American poetry is the history of an impulse towards antinomianism, the 19th century being essentially antinomian in which concerns the field of poetry.Little by little, man also becomes a creator, as the making of a poem is an act of creation and not of «invention», as the Puritans put it;we assist to a shift in the meaning of «invention»: from «coming upon» something made and ordered by God, to «making», «ordering», transforming something into that which manifests above all man’s power to make and order. Thus the imagination does not have to be extinct, but its main function should be to extract what is useful and to represent what is real, human mind is freed from well-established patterns regarding belief, man has the possibility to choose, to adopt one belief instead of the other.