SOURCE: Brown, Clarence Arthur. “The Aesthetics of Romanticism.” In The Achievement of American Criticism: Representative Selections from Three Hundred Years of American Criticism, selected by Clarence Arthur Brown, pp. 149-82. New York: The Ronald Press, 1954.

In the following essay, Brown offers an overview of the emergence of the various schools of nineteenth-century American literary criticism, most of which were based on the aesthetics of Romanticism and devoted to the development of a national literature.

The rise of romanticism can be seen in early issues of the North American Review.¹ Traditionally, since its founding in 1815, the magazine had been recognized for its conservatism and its expression of late eighteenth-century points of view in literary criticism as well as in politics. During the first years of its career, the North American was unfriendly to romanticism—Keats, Shelley, Byron, and Coleridge, among others, were either ignored or attacked.² Such men as...