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AMERICAN ROMANTICISM1800 - 1860
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
- Henry David Thoreau
Political and Social Milestones
The Louisiana Purchase - 1803
The Gold Rush - 1849
Education and Reform
Rationalism vs Romanticism
The rationalists believed the city to be a place to find success and self-realization
The romantics associated the countryside with independence, moral clarity, and healthful living.
Characteristics of American Romanticism
Values feeling and intuition over reason
Places faith in inner experience and the power of the imagination
Shuns the artificiality of civilization and seeks unspoiled nature
Prefers youthful innocence to educated sophistication
Champions individual freedom and the worth of the individual
Contemplates nature’s beauty as a path to spiritual and moral development
Characteristics (continued)
Looks backward to the wisdom of the past and distrusts progress
Finds beauty and truth in exotic locals, the supernatural realm, and the inner world of the imagination
Sees poetry as the highest expression of the imagination
Finds inspiration in myth, legend, and folk culture
The European Insult
European writers felt America was too new and uncultured to produce good literature. American poets responded by proving
they could write European-style, traditional poems.
American prose writers (short stories, novels) responded by embracing American culture and establishing a distinctly American literature.
The Fireside Poets
Worked within European literary traditions
Used English themes, meter, imagery with American settings and subjects
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, Oliver Wendel Holmes, James Russell Lowell
The New American Novel
James Fenimore Cooper
Natty Bumpo - new kind of hero
Triumph of American innocence
Popular twenty and twenty-first century Romantic heroes
New American Novelists
Herman Melville - (ex-sailor) wrote Moby Dick
Nathaniel Hawthorne - wrote The Scarlet Letter
American Renaissance 1840-1860 Not really a “rebirth” but a “coming of
age”
Transcendentalism The idea that in
determining the ultimate reality of God, the universe, the self, and other important matters, one must transcend, or go beyond, everyday human experience in the physical world.
Ralph Waldo Emerson influenced by ancient Greek - Plato
Also based on Puritan belief and Romantics
Based on intuition; optimistic
Henry David Thoreau Emerson’s close friend
Dark Romantics
Believed in a world beyond the physical world but weren’t convinced it was necessarily good
Edgar Allen Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville known as Dark Romantics
Explored conflicts between good and evil, psychological effects of guilt and sin, and madness
Whitman and Dickinson19th century’s greatest poets
Spoke to the masses Universal
brotherhood, democracy
Aimed for overall impression, free verse based on cadence
Saw understanding of the self as the key to the universe
Obscure homebody In nature, found
metaphors for the spirit
Meticulous word choice, precise language, evoking feelings
All but a few poems published posthumously