American nineteenth century

American poetry spent the first half of the century learning the English forms and the second half breaking them. Bryant, Longfellow, Whittier and Lowell wrote for the fireside, in ballad metre, in the Kalevala's trochees, in hexameters; Poe made sound itself the subject and gave the century its most famous refrain.

Then Whitman abandoned metre for the long cadenced line of the Bible and the orator, and Dickinson kept the hymn stanza and broke it from inside with dashes, slant rhymes and abrupt endings. Lanier tried to make verse obey the laws of music. Between Whitman's line and Dickinson's, most of twentieth-century American poetry is already implied.