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Significance of the Early Poets
product of a new civilization, but as a whole is the extremely sophisticated result of English literary traditions. In style at least it is highly imitative of English models, and in many instances it shows an immediate transmission of literary influences. Finally, in the average merit of its style, it is, at least in the eighteenth century, quite equal to all but the very best of its time in the mother country. Altogether, the first two centuries of American poetry prepared the soil for the truly native growth that was to come after 1812—a growth that was no sudden phenomenon but simply the inevitable result of the cumulative forces of two hundred years.
