Romantic Legacies and Modernist Transformations: A Transatlantic Study of Poetry

Abstract

This paper examines the transition from Romanticism to Modernism in European and American poetry, highlighting the cross-cultural exchanges that shaped literary innovation from the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth century. Romanticism, exemplified by William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Percy Bysshe Shelley in England, and by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman in America, emphasized imagination, nature, and the self as central to poetic expression. Their emphasis on individual subjectivity and organic form laid the groundwork for modern poetics. In the early twentieth century, Modernism disrupted these traditions through experimentation with fragmentation, symbolism, and allusion, as seen in the works of T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Wallace Stevens, alongside W.B. Yeats, whose career bridged Romantic revivalism and Modernist innovation. The paper argues that Modernism, while often defined by rupture, retained Romantic preoccupations with memory, the natural world, and the search for meaning, adapting them to an age of urbanization, war, and cultural dislocation. By comparing Romantic and Modernist texts across Europe and America, this study shows how poetry operated as a transatlantic dialogue rather than isolated national traditions, with influences circulating across the Atlantic to shape form and content. Ultimately, the analysis reveals that the persistence of Romantic themes within Modernist experimentation demonstrates both continuity and transformation in the history of poetry.