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American Romanticism
Or, Sounding our Barbaric Yawp (and Maybe Getting Shamed for it)
In the late 18th and early 19th centuries in Europe, a literary and philosophical movement we
now know as Romanticism became popularized. This literary/philosophical movement (as most
such movements are) was a reaction against the previous time period’s rational, logic-based
literature and philosophy. Romanticism in Europe had the characteristics of celebrating
spontaneity instead of control, imagination and intuition instead of reason, subjectivity and
metaphysical musing versus objective fact, revolutionary energy versus tradition, individualism
versus social conformity, democracy versus monarchy, and so on. (The change between the Age
of Reason and Romanticism is beautifully satirized in Jane Austen’s novel Sense and
Sensibility, where two sisters, Elinor (“Sense― – representing the Age of Reason) and
Marianne (“Sensibility― – representing the new Romantic Age) must each find that their
way of looking at the world is damaging.)
The first book of this literary period is usually considered to be Sorrows of Young Werther, a
novel published by the German author Goethe, in which the main character is a forlorn sensitive
lover who kills himself at the end of the novel. From Germany, the literary movement flourished
in England, where poets like Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron, Coleridge, and Keats, along
with novelist Mary Shelley, wrote works that emphasized the imagination, spirituality (instead of
religious conformity), spontaneity, and spiritual and physical healing found through Nature.
The same movement traveled to America, but at a later time and with different characteristics. In
America, the movement began as frontier literature with the writing of Washington Irving and
James Fenimore Cooper – the ideal Romantic hero, in this case, was a frontiersman who
embodied the heroic, spontaneous man as living in Nature. (Natty Bumppo, the main character in
Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans series, is such a hero.) Later American Romantics tended
to be divided into two camps: those who saw redemption in human imagination and in Nature,
and those who questioned the optimism of such views and emphasized the guilt and suffering
they felt was inherent in a human life.
The first of these later groups is often referred to as the “Light― Romantics: they include
the Transcendentalists (Emerson and Thoreau) and Walt Whitman, whose poem Song of Myself
was the poetic celebration of the ideals of Romanticism. The second group, those who
questioned the Transcendental movement’s ideals, is usually known as the “Dark―
Romantics: Poe (whose horror stories reflected his personal experience of life), Hawthorne
(whose work reflected his family’s Puritan guilt), Melville (whose great American novel,
Moby-Dick, shows the human capacity for sin, guilt, and abuse of the natural world), and
Dickinson (whose poetry characterizes the individualism of the Transcendentalists while
critiquing it).
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