SOURCE: Stafford, John. “Young America's Theory of Criticism.” In The Literary Criticism of “Young America”: A Study in the Relationship of Politics and Literature 1837-1850, pp. 39-53. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1952.

In the following excerpt, Stafford examines the critical theory associated with the group of reviewers known as “Young America”—a group that included Cornelius Mathews, Evert A. Duyckinck, William A. Jones, John L. O'Sullivan, and Parke Godwin—and their dedication to a democratic national literature.

I

To understand Young America's criticism, we must consider the group's theories and assumptions about the function and method of literary criticism, as well as Young America's social milieu. The adoption of a critical or aesthetic theory or of a particular method of criticism may have only an indirect influence on the practice of criticism. As R. P. Blackmur says of all critics, “the personal element in a given critic—what...