CHAPTER VIII. POE AND WHITMAN
Enter now two egotists, who have little in common save their
egotism, two outsiders who upset most of the conventional
American rules for winning the literary race, two men of genius,
in short, about whom we are still quarreling, and whose
distinctive quality is more accurately perceived in Europe than
it has ever been in the United States.
Both Poe and Whitman were Romanticists by temperament. Both
shared in the tradition and influence of European Romanticism.
But they were also late comers, and they were caught in the more
morbid and extravagant phases of the great European movement
while its current was beginning to ebb. Their acquaintance with
its literature was mainly at second-hand and through the medium
of British and American periodicals. Poe, who was older than
Whitman by ten years, was fifteen when Byron died, in 1824. He
was untouched by the nobler mood of Byron, though his verse was
colored by the influence of Byron, Moore, and Shelley. His prose
models were De Quincey, Disraeli, and Bulwer.
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