Walt Whitman's Lead into Modernism

Walt Whitman is unmistakably one of the most renowned and influential early American romantic poets. However, his revolutionary style and structure, ideologies and unbridled optimism for society and mankind made way for departures from Romanticism towards a new movement; Modernism. Thomson Gale writes that Modernism can be "defined by its rejection of the literary conventions of the nineteenth century and by its opposition to conventional morality, taste, traditions, and economic values." (Thompson Gale). Literary modernism …

…London: Methuen & Co., 1977. Folsom, Ed and Price, Kenneth M. The Walt Whitman Archive. 20 Sept. 2004 http://www.whitmanarchive.org/ Kaplan, Justin (ed.). Whitman Poetry and Prose. New York: Library of America, 1996. Lacour, Brodsky C. Romantic and Postromantic Poetics. The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1993. Murphy, Francis (ed.). Walt Whitman: A Critical Anthology. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969. Thompson Gale. "Glossary" Thompson Gale Online. 23 Sept. 2004 http://owl.english.purdue.edu/