With respect to the prevailing style of poetry, at the present day, in our country, we apprehend that it will be found, in too many instances, tinged with a sickly and affected imitation of the peculiar manner of some of the late popular poets of England. We speak not of a disposition to enumerate whatever is beautiful and excellent in their writings, — still less would we be understood as intending to censure that sort of imitation which, exploring all the treasures of English poetry, culls from all a diction, that shall form a natural and becoming dress for the conceptions of the writer, — this is a course of preparation which every one ought to go through before he appears before the public — but we desire to set a mark on that servile habit of copying, which adopts the vocabulary of some favorite author, and apes the fashions of his sentences, and cramps and forces the ideas into a shape, which they would not naturally have taken, and of which the only recommendation is, not that it is most elegant or most striking, but that it bears some resemblance to the manner of him who is proposed as a model. This way of writing has an air of poverty and meanness — it seems to indicate a paucity of reading as well as perversion of taste — it might almost lead us to suspect that the writer had but one or two examples of poetical composition in his hands, and was afraid of expressing himself, except according to some formula which they might contain — and it ever has been, and ever will be, the resort of those who are sensible that their works need some factitious recommendation, to give them even a temporary popularity.

William Cullen Bryant, American Poetry
An essay written in 1818

Posted 11 August 1996

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