Formal Experimentation in American Romanticism
The American Romantics were a pretty nonconformist bunch. They were individualists, after all. They were rebels with a cause.
For this reason, their writing often breaks literary conventions. If we take Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, for instance, we'll find that it is many things all at once. It's a novel, but it's also a whaling manual (blegh—those whaling chapters are the hardest) and a philosophical tract. The book, in other words, isn't easy to classify in terms of genre… though it's usually discussed as a novel.
Likewise, Walt Whitman's poetry broke many poetic conventions of the time. Walt Whitman, for example, developed "free verse," a style of writing poetry that didn't rely on meter or rhyme. For the time, this sort of poetic experimentation was pre-tty radical.
Chew On This
Check out Walt Whitman's "free verse" in action in these quotations from his poem "Song of Myself."
Delve into this analysis of genre in Herman Melville's Moby-Dick to understand how Melville mixes it all up in the novel