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