impossible. Robinson Jeffers' narrative poems celebrated the "flam-
ing" of the human spirit in its deluded quest for what can never be
realized. And more realistically, Scott Fitzgerald emphasized the
nobility of The Great Gatsby, who dreamed greatly even if falsely.
While making clear that American dreamers have been "enchanted,"
many moderns have preferred the romantic quest for the unattain-
able to the dull acceptance of the actual.

Historically, these different attitudes toward the dream have
dominated different periods of American literature. But just as the
dream itself has found expression from the earliest proclamation of
the "Wonder-working Providence," to the latest "Epic of America,"
so the different attitudes toward it have been repeated throughout
American history, If the enthusiastic acceptance of the dream found
fullest expression in nineteenth century Transcendentalism, it has
recurred in such modern novelists as Thomas Wolfe and John Stein-
beck. If the traditional rejection of the dream found classic expres-
sion in the novels of Melville and Hawthorne, it has been repeated
by the "new" critics and the modern poets. If the pragmatic realism,
which criticized the dream but embodied many of its ideals, domi-
nated the early 1900's, it had earlier characterized the autobiography
of Benjamin Franklin, and continues "from here to eternity." And
if the romantic but hopeless celebration of the dream gives tragic
beauty to the modern dramas of O'Neill, it was, after all, typical of
the historic "romanticism" of Poe too.

The American dream, and the patterns of thinking and feeling
which it has inspired, has given form and significance to American
literature.

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