grasshopper-
Sure, I can find sources for you on how poetry writing was a common practice in the 19th Century. Offhand I have here the foreward to a recent translation of Heinrich Heine's love poems, translated by Walter W. Arndt, with the foreward by Jeffrey L. Sammons:
"... In those days Germany was full of verse, Everyone wrote it, from schoolchildren to government ministers, even the King of Bavaria, and, if possible, published it in Almanacs, calendars, journals, and newspapers. It had become too easy to write; the ubiquity dulled critical discrimination..."
You would find it was the same throughout Europe. I believe that in the U.S. there was relatively less verse writing. Americans fell in love with the camera. However, verse was still much more frequently written in the U.S. then than now. But academic criticism had not been a part of American life to be dulled in the first place. Nevertheless, American literature was at a high point circa 1850, and I'll bet you more American Presidents wrote verse for pleasure in that period through Abraham Lincoln, than since.
You can catch me in one of my sweeping statements sometime, but not this one...
[This message has been edited by albert geiser (edited April 19, 2005).]
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