Do the years between the Revolution and the Civil War really form a period in New England writing? So far this book has been transmitting mixed signals on the issue. Chapter 2 discussed the entire time span of this study in unitary terms as a movement toward literary self-realization, yet the partial correlations made in Chapter 3 between Romanticism and the rise of professionalism might suggest that we have here two disparate historical and aesthetic segments lumped together.

The notion of a sharp break between an early national or Federalist or Neoclassical period and an antebellum or Romantic period is not merely a scholarly retrospection but is also inherent in the later writers' conception of their historical moment. To antebellum New England authors outside the vicinity of Hartford and New Haven, the Connecticut Wits seemed quite as obsolete as the Puritan poets had seemed to the Wits.