American and English Romanticism diverged because their class bases differed

Evidence

The origins of English Romanticism are inseparable from the anti-capitalist passions of Blake, and it had the Cromwellian radicalism of Milton in its past; even Wordsworth and Coleridge had been, before their respective Tory conversions, radical supporters of the Jacobin content in the French Revolution. The main currents of American Romanticism were, by contrast, oracular and transcendentalist, optimistic and confident; this one can see readily if one were to pause and think what ‘transcendence’ might have meant to, say, Blake and Emerson respectively. … The experience which had produced this Romanticism – especially in the dominant, Emersonian current – was not the experience of industrial capitalism, as in England, but that of a society of independent petty commodity producers, which was the predominant mode of existence for the middling classes of the Eastern seaboard until the mid nineteenth century. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 82

Categorization

• SEED: An essay contrasting how the economic base of a literary movement (petty commodity producers vs. industrial capitalism) shapes its aesthetic temperament — useful frame for analyzing other national literatures.
• XREF: Connects to Marxist literary criticism tradition (Lukács, Jameson) and to later critiques of American exceptionalism in cultural form.