The failed revolutions of 1848, laissez-faire capitalism, and authoritarianism conspired to lower a cloud of resignation and discontent across Europe. The poets of the era debated the value of the intellectualism over emotionalism, and eventually turned from verse influenced by romantic... [more]

The failed revolutions of 1848, laissez-faire capitalism, and authoritarianism conspired to lower a cloud of resignation and discontent across Europe. The poets of the era debated the value of the intellectualism over emotionalism, and eventually turned from verse influenced by romantic folksongs to an epigrammatic poetry obsessed with mental states. The characters of their poems are plausible individuals with autonomous motivations and unremarkable diction. Like wax figurines, Realist works concentrate on the semblance of life in their focus on the observable and telling detail, avoiding the improbable, the idealized, or the glamorous. Robert Browning wrote sober monologues in the idiom of ordinary speech, while fellow-Brit Thomas Hardy wrote ballads and dramatic lyrics centering on incidents in the lives of people at the mercy of indifferent forces. Among the German Realist were the lyric poets Eduard Morike, and Annette von Droste-H'lshoff, while France produced Emile Zola's cronies, Tristan Corbi're and Jules Laforgue. The movement also took hold in fiction, notably with Zola, Honore Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, and George Elliot. Realism crossed the ocean late in the century, coloring the work American poets Hart Crane, Edwin Arlington Robinson, and Carl Sandburg, and the novelists Henry James, Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain), and Stephen Crane. Realism lent its scientific credentials and objective muscle to the related movement of Naturalism, which engulfed the former by the turn of the century. Realism is now such a pervasive, inextricable literary element it is rarely separated out as a distinctive movement. [show less]