Unit #3 Intro PPT
Romanticism
Transcendentalism
Dark Romanticism
Adventure Works: The ultimate source for outdoor equipment
American Romanticism
1800—1860
The journey begins!
…yearning, striving, becoming…
What kind of people?
What kind of country?
What kind of culture are we
becoming?
Who will be our heroes?
The New Frontier
• Post-Revolutionary War
 Citizens of new nation –restless
Many journey into the American frontier
 The frontier was the spirit of America
 The frontier provided original American literature
markedly different from European writing
• “Manifest Destiny” Westward expansion
 Many Americans began to feel it was the destiny or fate of the
United States to rule North America from coast to coast.
• The “Frontier Hero” emerged in life and in literature
The Romantic Hero
“A Frontier Man”
• Young, or possesses youthful qualities
• Innocent -- pure of purpose
• Possesses a sense of humor based not on
society’s rules but on some higher principle
• Has knowledge of people and of life based
on deep, intuitive understanding, not on
formal learning
• Loves nature and avoids town life
• Quests for some higher truth in the natural
world
The Frontier Hero’s
Characteristics
• Acute and inquisitive
• Practical and inventive
• Quick to find
expedients
• Masterful grasp of
material things
• Restless
• Dominant individualist
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Generous
Innocent
Morally upright
Physically healthy
Ethically courageous
Natty Bumppo
“His face…was simply
guileless truth, sustained by
an earnestness of purpose
and a sincerity of feeling,
that rendered it
remarkable.”
James Fennimore Cooper,
describing Natty Bumppo in
The Deerslayer, 1823
Davy Crockett:
King of the Wild
Frontier!
He became famous in
Romantic Hero
Tennessee as a noted
hunter, backwoods
politician and speaker
for the common man.
In Texas, however, he
will always be
remembered as a
hero at the Battle of
the Alamo.
Daniel Boone:
an American
pioneer and
frontiersman who
settled in Kentucky.
His exploits in the
wilderness and
during the
American
Revolution led to his
becoming a folk
hero.
Fireside Poets
• First group of American poets to rival British poets in
popularity in either country.
• Preferred conventional forms over experimentation.
• Often used American legends and scenes of American life
as their subject matter.
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Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
William Cullen Bryant
James Russell Lowell
Oliver Wendell Holmes
John Greenleaf Whittier
AAmerica’s most
popular poet
A“household name”
.
By the shores of Gitche Gumi,
By the shining Big-Sea-Water,
Stood the wigwam of Nokomis
Daughter of the Moon, Nokomis,
Dark behind it rose the forest,
Rose the black and gloomy pine
trees,
Rose the firs with cones upon
them;
Bright before it beat the water,
Beat the clear and sunny water,
Beat the shining Big-Sea Water.
The Song of Hiawatha 1855
Longfellow’s
epic poem about Hiawatha and his lover Minnehaha is in
1855
the meter of a Finnish folk-epic The Kalevala. Dr. Allen is Finnish.
Nature as an ideal
• Man can live in harmony with nature
• Absence of crime
• Free from corrupting influences
of city life
• Uncorrupted by “civilization”
• Truth is found in nature
• Nature instructs and heals
• Nature was God’s finest work
Intellectual Reasoning
gives way to
The Spirit of Individualism
• Man should rely more on his instincts and
intuition than his reasoning abilities
• Nature which was evil to the Puritans and
practical to the Rationalists becomes a
place of refuge to the Romantics.
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
Characteristics of
American Romanticism
• Contemplates nature’s beauty as a path to spiritual and moral
development
• Looks backward to the wisdom of the past and distrusts
progress (nostalgia)
• Finds beauty and truth in exotic locales, 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
Puritans
Focus: God
Form of Government: Theocracy—Divinely appointed
government
The American: a hard worker, faithful, spiritual and
family-oriented
The American’s values: based on his relationship to
God and his family.
Truth: Acquired through spiritual experiences
Literature: the Bible, personal texts, poetry based on
God and family
View of Nature: The Devil’s domain, the last
stronghold of Satan, a place/force to be feared
Rationalists
Focus: The nation
Form of Government: The emergence of democracy
The American: intellectual, politically-active, selfmade man
The American’s values: higher education, political
debate, survival of the nation
Truth: Acquired through intellectual reasoning
Literature: speeches, pamphlets, journals, almanacs,
brochures and autobiographies
Rhetoric: derived from the theories of Enlightenment
philosophers and thinkers
View of Nature: Valued for its scientific offerings and
should be studied
Romantics
Focus: The individual
Form of Government: Democracy focused on
expanding boundaries
The American: the frontiersman, explorer,
Romantic hero
The American’s values: intuition and feelings
were valued over intellect and reason
Truth: Acquired through personal journey
Literature: folk tales, poetry, the short story
View of Nature: place of refuge, holds the key to
spiritual truths and healing
Transcendentalism
Optimism
Idealism
Intuition
Determining the ultimate reality of God,
the universe, the self by transcending everyday
human experience.
What is Transcendentalism?
• A belief in the innate divinity of every man and faith in his capability to
understand immortality, the soul, and God through intuition rather than
through pure reason.
• TRUST YOURSELF! The Transcendentalists considered human nature divine.
Since the secret voice of God is within man, he has no need to obey any
other command. He can trust himself.
• . Among the major ideas that the Transcendentalists emphasized were
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the desire to live close to nature
the dignity of manual labor
the essential unity of all religions
as spirit of tolerance and optimism
a defiance of tradition
a personal relationship with God
a belief in democracy
a disregard for external authority.
Characteristics of Transcendentalism
• Sense knowledge is unreliable
• All reality is in the long run spiritual
• The only apt instrument for contacting the world outside is the
mind
• By the mind, they do not mean the reasoning process (also
unreliable) but a special faculty which puts them immediately
in touch with truth without any other aid or contact.
• All reality is One. (This Oneness is called God or the Oversoul).
• There is no distinction between God, men, and things for they
are all participants of the One.
• Transcendentalism came to mean inspiration or intuition as a
method of arriving at truth.
Transcendentalists were
idealists who believed in
human perfectability.
They worked to achieve
this goal…utopian society.
TRANSCENDENTALISM:
Everything in
the world,
including human
beings, is a
reflection of the
Divine Soul.
Transcendentalists viewed
nature as the doorway to a
mystical world holding
important truths.
TRANSCENTALISM:
People can use their
INTUITION
to behold God’s spirit
revealed in
Nature or in their own
souls.
SELF-RELIANCE and INDIVIDUALISM
must outweigh
external authority and blind conformity
to custom and tradition.
Spontaneous feelings and INTUITION
are superior
to deliberate intellectualism
and rationality.
Two important leaders in the
Transcendentalist movement
• Ralph Waldo Emerson was a poet and essayist known
for his philosophical explorations of the individual. His
most famous works were Nature, The American Scholar,
and Self-Reliance.
 Emerson wrote on ideas such as individuality, freedom,
the ability for humankind to realize almost anything, and
the relationship between the soul and the surrounding
world.
• Henry David Thoreau was a poet and writer who
explored individualism through nature, most famously in
Walden and Civil Disobedience.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Writer
Poet
Philosopher
--A primary force behind the
flowering of America
--Wanted to create a more
perfect society--UTOPIA
He helped inspire many movements to
--improve public education
--abolish slavery
--elevate status of women
--improve social conditions
Emerson believed we can
find God directly in
nature.
God is good.
God works through
nature, he believed.
Therefore, even the
natural events that seem
most tragic—
disease, death, disaster—
can be explained on a
spiritual level.
Death is simply a
part of the
cycle of life.
We are capable of
evil
because we are
separated
from a direct,
intuitive knowledge
of God, according to
Emerson.
“I unsettle all
things.
No facts are to
me Sacred;
none are
Profane;
I simply
experiment, an
endless seeker,
with no Past at
my back.”
-Emerson
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau (18171862) exerted a profound,
enduring influence on
American thought and letters.
His famous experiment in
living close to nature, and his
equally famous night in jail to
protest an inhuman institution
and an unjust war, are distilled
in his best known works,
Walden and "Civil
Disobedience."
Thoreau
• Was a social reformer, naturalist, philosopher,
transcendentalist and scientist
• As a philosopher and transcendentalist, Thoreau believed
that was PART of the forces and laws of the universe, not the
creator (so he did not have one religion and recognized all
world religions)
• As a writer, he was inspiration to mentor to Emerson
Thoreau’s Walden Experiment
• Went to live two years in the Concord Words
at Walden Pond where he lived off the land,
meditated, wrote poetry and developed a
reverence for all living things
• Intended to test the ability of man to
transcend his senses and attain a higher
understanding of life
“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
from WALDEN, or
“I wanted to live deep and
suck out all the marrow of life,
to live so sturdily and
Spartan-like as to put to rout
all that was not life, to cut a
broad swath and shave close,
to drive life into a corner, and
reduce it to its lowest terms,
and, if it proved to be mean,
why then to get the whole and
genuine meanness of it, and
publish its meanness to the
world; or if it is sublime, to
know it by experience, and be
able to give a true account of
it in my next excursion. For
most men…have somewhat
hastily concluded that it is the
chief end of man here to
“glorify God and enjoy him
forever.”
The
Dark
Romantics
Edgar
Allan
Poe
Herman
Melville
Nathaniel
Hawthorne
Who were the “Dark Romantics?”
• Dark romanticism is a literary subgenre that emerged
from the Transcendental philosophical movement.
• Works in the dark romantic spirit were influenced by
Transcendentalism, but did not entirely embrace the
ideas of Transcendentalism, but notably less optimistic
• Authors considered most representative of dark
romanticism are Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel
Hawthorne, Herman Melville and poet Emily Dickinson
• View: http://educationportal.com/academy/lesson/the-dark-romantics-inamerican-literature.html#lesson
Characteristics of the Dark Romantics
• Much less confident about the notion that
perfection is an innate quality of mankind
• Individual is prone to sin and self-destruction
(NOT as inherently possessing divinity or
wisdom)
• Believed nature was a deeply spiritual force,
but one that was more sinister
• Natural world was dark, decaying and
mysterious and when it reveals truth to man,
revelations are evil and hellish
• Frequently show individuals failing in their
attempts to make changes for the better
Writers such as Hawthorne,
Melville, and Poe
acknowledged the existence of
sin
pain
evil
in human life.
They formed a counterpoint
to the optimism of the
Transcendentalists.
Tales
of the
ghastly
and the
grotesque…
Master of
the Macabre!
Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allen Poe
• Many consider Edgar Allan Poe to be the seminal dark
romantic author.
• Much of his poetry and prose features his characteristic
interest in exploring the psychology of man, including
the perverse and self-destructive nature of the
conscious and subconscious mind.
• Some of Poe’s notable dark romantic works include
the short stories "Ligeia" and "The Fall of the House of
Usher" and poems "The Raven" and "Ulalume".
Edgar Allen Poe
• Recurring themes in his short stories which
illustrate the movement
 Concrete symbolism of terror
 Stress on “sound” as a tool of fear (use in
combination with description of the
environment)
 Setting plays a significant role; highlights the
major elements of mystery
“To one who has
weathered Cape Horn
as a common sailor,”
Melville wrote of
Emerson’s ideas,
“what stuff all this is.”
A keen eye
and a
questioning
voice…
“Failure
is the true test
of greatness.”
Herman Melville
• Best known during his lifetime for his travel books, a
twentieth-century revival in the study of Herman Melville’s
works has left “Moby-Dick” and “Bartleby the Scrivener”
among his most highly regarded.
• Also known for writing of man's blind ambition, cruelty,
and defiance of God, his themes of madness, mystery,
and the triumph of evil over good in these two works
make them notable examples of the dark romanticism
sub-genre.
• Nathaniel
Hawthorne was
born in Salem,
from a family of
Puritans
• "The Scarlet Letter”
• Themes centered
on the inherent evil
and sin of
humanity, and his
works often have a
moral message
Hawthorne
• Nathaniel Hawthorne is the dark romantic writer with the
closest ties to the American Transcendental movement. He
was associated with the community in New England and
even lived at the Brook Farm Transcendentalist Utopian
commune for a time before he became troubled by the
movement; his literature later became anti-transcendental
in nature.
• Also troubled by his ancestors' participation in the Salem
witch trials, Hawthorne's short stories, including "The
Minister's Black Veil", frequently take the form of
"cautionary tales about the extremes of individualism and
reliance on human beings" and hold that guilt and sin are
qualities inherent in man