by the 1880s, "[m]uch of what is called nineteenth-century American literature was over. Poe and Hawthorne, Thoreau and Emerson were dead; Whitman and Melville were in their final years"
"By the 1880s and 1890s there was little poetry being written in America that now attracts the interest of the work immediately preceding it and following it: the eye of a hurricane in which the language itself was tumbing and turning" (110)
footnote: "An interesting exception is Stephen Crane (1871-1900), who wrote poetry that in its directness of image marks an important break with English verse"
"In one sense, the most significant event for poetry in [this period] was the posthumous [...] first publication of Emily Dickinson's poems in 1890"
"Dickinson achieved a greater textual eccentricity and self-sufficiency than any other nineteenth-century American writer; her work looked and sounded least like standard English, so it is altogether appropriate that it should emerge at a time of great transition for the language"