Fireside poets

I have to say that the fireside poets are really artists that I could enjoy, that is, if I did not have to write a series of reflections taking each and every joy out of my life. The fireside poets are very different from Rationalists and Puritans, mostlybecause of the things in life that they valued. Rationalists enjoyed their reason, Puritans loved their God, and the fireside poets had their own ideas about what was important. These differences were what made the different types of literature so different from each other.

One thing that stands out to me while reading them is that the style seems a lot like the that of Puritan writings. Whatserface's poem about how her house burnt down sounds a lot like a person telling a story that just happens to rhyme every few sylables (Bradstreet 91). A better way to say that might be that her wording is fairly plain and very natural. This is also the case with the fireside poets, as both use even meters as well. One big difference between Puritan poetry and the fireside poets is that the fireside poets do not make any real issue and mention of God. Another big difference between the two is how emotional the fireside poems were. When reading holmes' "Old Ironsides" I could barely keep myself contained it was so emotional (Holmes 211). The poem is so charged with emotion that the Puritan poems can not hold a candle to it.

It is very difficult for my to compare fireside poets with Rationalist poetry, mainly because I have never yet come across a peice of Rationalist poetry, if it even exists at all. Poetry is the ultimate expression of feeling, and a Rationalist would generally have valued their thoughts far more than their felings, and therefore would not have wasted their time on poetry. That is probably the reason that prose was so popular compared to poetry. Anyway, there really is not much in common between them except that they both wrote very little about God. Maybe another similarity would be that they were both patriotic at times.

I guess that all three of the different literary periods are very different, and somewhat hard to compare. There really is not much similar between them, because every literary period is a sort of rebelion agains the one that came before it, and each generation cooses a different aspect to rebel against. The things the fireside poets really valued ere beauty and their feelings. When people think of poetry these are the first things that come to mind, which just goes to show how much influence the fireside poets had on American literature. That makes sense, because these writers were the first real literary artists of America.

I really enjoy reading this kind of poetry myself. There is something very wonderful about the way they write and the things they write about.



Bradstreet, Anne. "Upon the Burning of Our House." Comp. Jeffrey D. Wilhelm, Ph.D. and Douglas Fisher, Ph.D. Glencoe Literature. American Literature ed. Columbus: McGraw-Hill Companies, 2009. 97-99. Print.

Holmes, Oliver. "Old Ironsides." Comp. Jeffrey D. Wilhelm, Ph.D. and Douglas Fisher, Ph.D. Glencoe Literature. American Literature ed. Columbus: McGraw-Hill Companies, 2009. 97-99. Print.