Through Irving, Hawthorne and Poe by Justin Cooper
             If we follow the stream of American romanticism through its shining era of the decades preceding the Civil War, we see a robust river of humanist thought: Emerson, Thoreau, Whittier, Longfellow, Whitman, Melville. Each sees in his own way the beauty of Man and his place in Nature, transcending it, embracing it, a restless soul in search of elusive and worthy truths. But concurrent to that stream of light runs a darker river, the roman noir, the Gothic, whose chief practitioners are Washington Irving (1783-1859), Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864), and Edgar Allen Poe (1809-1849). These three authors defined a black thread in American literature that while not entirely original (borrowing from European Gothicism and certain American precursors) was perfected in their works and continues to show its form in subsequent literature both American and European.
             While this dark trio of writers had influences and predecessors in the supernatural goings-on at Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto, the haunted old mariner of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the doomed, brooding heroes of Lord Byron, they too had American roots. Notable among these are the witchcraft writings of Cotton Mather, the dark and vengeful sermons of Jonathan Edwards, and the supernatural, pre-psychological Wieland of Charles Brockden Brown. Irving and Hawthorne would draw much inspiration from Mather; Hawthorne would take from Edwards his fire-and-brimstone menace; Poe would find much in common with the troubled mental state of Wieland.
             Irving and Hawthorne are also united in their singular sense of setting; both "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" (1820) and "The Maypole of Merry Mount" (1835) have an Arcadian, Edenic element which bears further study.
             Irving set some of his stories ("Sleepy Hollow," "Rip Van Winkle") in the mythic lay-...