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Poem in a Landscape

The Contrast

 With pen in hand, I shall contrast, 
The present moments with the past
And mark difference, not by grains, 
But weighed by feelings, joys and pains. 
Calm, tranquil—far from fashion’s gaze, 
Passed all my earliest, happy days 
Sweetly flew the golden hours, 
In St. Mary’s woodland bowers 
Or my father’s simple hall, 
Oped to whomsoe’er might call

Bamewawagezhikaquay: Jane Johnston Schoolcraft’s Postpastoral Poetics

The creative psyche of the Romantic poets of the nineteenth-century United States was shaped by the idea of the American continent as a far-­reaching wilderness now within perceived possession, with identifiable and reachable frontiers. The blossoming of U. S. literature is often seen as a landscape composed of such well-known poets as Emerson, Longfellow, Bryant, Whittier, Dickinson, and Whitman. But a host of other writers, some with very different perspectives on the physical landscape, were also contributing to the cultural and literary landscape of the United States during this time.