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Romantic Encounters with Nature Personification of Nature Identification with Personified Nature Elevation of Persona’s Spirit—Rebirth:
feelings of youth Perception of the Spiritual in Nature Expansion of Persona’s Vision to a Larger
Humanity
Poetry: Romantic Theories
Wordsworth: “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”; “from emotion recollected in tranquillity”
Shelley: Poets “the unacknowledged legislators of the world”
Keats: “truth of Imagination”; “Beauty is truth, truth beauty”
American Romantics: Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman More direct connection with Nature:
Emerson: “transparent eyeball”; “Nature is the incarnation of thought”
Thoreau: “Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself?”
Whitman: “My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this air”
Identification without personification
English Landscape Tradition
Edmund Burke, Philosophical Inquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757-59)
William Gilpin, Three Essays on Picturesque Beauty (1794)
Uvedale Price, Essay on the Picturesque (1794)
Edmund Burke The Sublime
gives people harsh and antisocial feelings of “agreeable horror”
associated with things or experiences that are powerful, threatening, vast or unclear
generally associated with masculine qualities associated with representations rather than
direct experience
Edmund Burke
The Beautiful the beautiful gives people harmonious and
sociable feelings. associated with things that are small, weak, soft,
pastel-colored, or sensually curved generally associated with feminine qualities.
The Picturesque: Gilpin
Roughness/ruggedness Subjects: Examples of picturesque
Ruined architecture Disheveled hair Patriarchal head Human body, esp. in action Animals: worn-out carthorse, cow, goat, ass, colors on
birds Smooth stallion is beautiful
Picturesque: Gilpin, cont.
Examples (cont.): lakes
Execution: free and bold Composition: variety of parts united
Shapes Light and shadow Color
Cause: indeterminate
The Picturesque: Price
Roughness, sudden variation (4) Associated with ruins, not with “the highest order
of created beings” (8) Examples:
Gothic architecture Hovels, mills, insides of old barns, stables, etc. “limbs of huge trees shattered by lightning or
tempestuous winds” (6) Animals: Ass, sheep, deer, lion (more than lioness)
ruffled birds (6-8) People: gypsies and beggars (8)
American Landscape Painting In the U.S. before 1820, landscape painting
was considered inferior to history painting and portraiture.
Landscape paintings were informational views of estates or cities: they were not considered great art.
American Landscape Painting However, between the 1820s and the Civil
War, landscape painting became the most important genre of American painting—the genre most associated with American identity.
Thomas Cole was largely responsible for this change.
Thomas Cole (1801-1845)
Born in England Moved to U.S. in 1818 Largely self-taught First member of the
“Hudson River School” of painting
Cole’s Landscapes
Emphasize the grandeur and wildness of the American landscape
Apply the European concepts of the sublime and the beautiful to the American landscape
Balance the powers of nature with the powers of civilization
European Landscape Tradition The Beautiful: associated with classical
ideas of order, clarity, and harmony
The Sublime: associated with horror, pain, danger, lack of clarity, disharmony
Dialectic: Example
Thesis: Louis XVI
Antithesis: French Revolution, Reign of Terror
Synthesis: Napoleon
Dialectic: Example
Thesis: Inductive Method of Bacon
Antithesis: Deductive Method of Descartes
Synthesis: Sir Isaac Newton combines inductive and deductive thinking (see 589)
Dialectic: Example
Thesis: Renaissance Style
Antithesis: Baroque Style
Synthesis: Wren’s English Baroque