The American elegiac sensibility--in Cooper, Melville, Thoreau, Mark Twain, James, and others--is most strongly engaged by the sense of lost modes of innocence, lost possibilities of brotherhood, magnanimity, and freedom, lost sources of moral spontaneity and spiritual refreshment. ...
The sense of 'local' community was being lost. ... To some writers, the alienation they felt and depicted was an exploration of the individual sensibility in a world which it was felt was becoming ever more standardized and uniform, an age of the masses. ... What went out was narrative, description, rational exposition; what emerged focused on stream of consciousness, images in poetry (rather than description or narration), a new use of universal myth, and a sense of fragmentation both of individuality and of such concepts as space and time. ... The language mix reflects a sense tha...
