...n and Shelley and most that was best in those of Tennyson, Arnold, Browning. It began the year following Joel Barlow's American epic , and the publication of by the Hartford Wits. Longfellow and Whittier were in the cradle, Holmes and Poe unborn. Except Freneau, there were no poets in the country but those imitative versifiers of an already antiquated English fashion whom Bryant was himself to cha...