American Romanticism Image Courtesy Library of Congress © 2009 McGraw-Hill Higher Education. All rights reserved. Key Figures • • • • • • • • Washington Irving (1783-1859) James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851) Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) Margaret Fuller (1810-1850) Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) Herman Melville (1819–1891) © 2009 McGraw-Hill Higher Education. All rights reserved. Key Dates • 1786 • 1791 • 1820–60 Publication of Freneau’s “The Wild Honey Suckle” Publication of Bartram’s Travels Peak of American Romanticism Bryant’s “Thanatopsis” Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” Irving’s “Sleepy Hollow” Cooper’s Pioneers Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter Emerson’s Representative Men 1851 Melville’s Moby-Dick 1854 Thoreau’s Walden 1855 Whitman’s Leaves of Grass • 1861 1817 1819 1820 1823 1845 1850 With the Civil War, the Romantic movement and its optimistic spirit ended © 2009 McGraw-Hill Higher Education. All rights reserved. Key Facts about the Period There are three principal reasons for the development of American Romanticism: • The breakup of New England Calvinist sects and the emergence of Unitarianism as a compromise between Calvinism and Deism. • The influence of French, British, and German Romanticism: Rousseau, Wordsworth, Carlyle, Scott, Shelley, Keats, Herder, Kant, and Goethe. • The rise of political nationalism, which fueled a cultural nationalism. © 2009 McGraw-Hill Higher Education. All rights reserved. Key Facts about American Romanticism Characteristics: • A sense of wonder • Belief in the potentiality of all life • Adherence to the view of individuals as innately good • Faith in the directing resource of the subconscious, inner life • The favoring of the emotions, intuition, and imagination over intellect, science, and rationalism © 2009 McGraw-Hill Higher Education. All rights reserved. Key Facts about American Romanticism • Anti-intellectual Books are for the scholar’s idle times. When he can read God directly [in nature], the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men’s transcripts of their readings. —Emerson, “The American Scholar” • A deep love of nature, a source of wisdom, guidance, consolation, and happiness (Consider the Hudson River School of Painting.) • Healthy contempt for traditions, conventions, and past knowledge, all of which can be restrictive of new, individualistic approaches to life The books of an older period will not fit this. … Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views, which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries, when they wrote these books. —Emerson, “The American Scholar” © 2009 McGraw-Hill Higher Education. All rights reserved. Key Facts about American Romanticism • Anti-authoritarianism and anti-institutionalism, celebrating those most remote from civilization’s corrupting influences, such as Indians and children There is something in the character and habits of the North American savage, taken in connection with the scenery over which he is accustomed to range, its vast lakes, boundless forests, majestic rivers and trackless plains, that is, to my mind, wonderfully striking and sublime. —Washington Irving, “Traits of Indian Character” • Intense nationalism, often calling for the development and support of a native literature © 2009 McGraw-Hill Higher Education. All rights reserved. Key Facts about American Romanticism • Search for more organic forms to compliment the new country • Works of adventurous literature (sometimes boyishly so), with stories of life among cannibals, Gothic horror tales, Indian fights, and struggles out West • For some, an interest in the Gothic, the mysterious, the strange (Hawthorne and Poe) • Often symbolic (Hawthorne, Melville, and Poe) • Often treat of openly personal, subjective, and autobiographical themes I celebrate myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. I loafe and invite my soul… I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard, Nature without check with original energy. —Walt Whitman, Song of Myself © 2009 McGraw-Hill Higher Education. All rights reserved. Key Facts about American Romanticism • An admiration for reformers and individuals of action, like John Brown (a hero to Thoreau, Melville, and Emerson) • Often involved in social movements, like abolition and women’s rights. • Activism often took precedence over writing My life has been the poem I would have writ But I could not both live and utter it. – Henry David Thoreau © 2009 McGraw-Hill Higher Education. All rights reserved.
