Emerson vs. Hawthorne

“Everybody deserves a second chance.” People love second chances because it’s an opportunity to prove oneself. Unfortunately, some don’t think we deserve our second chance, because we will just screw it up and make the situation even worse. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne were two similar guys. They were only a year apart in age and therefore both grew up during the same time period during Romanticism in the 1800s. During this time, people wanted to express themselves through creative writing, art, music, and especially poetry. These types of people were the majority, the Romantics, but then there were Dark Romantics, who opposed the optimism of the Romantics. They preferred intuition over reason and thought that finding God through nature was ridiculous. While Nathaniel Hawthorne was one of these Dark Romantics, Emerson was a Romantic. Their writings truly reflect how they felt inside and therefore they had completely different styles of writing. Dr Heidegger’s Experiment is about an old doctor who in the past has been experimenting with magic spells, drugs and potions. He has three of his close friends come over. Each of his friends has extremely messed up his live and now is paying for the mistakes. He offers them all a drink from the fountain of youth which will make them be young again, but only if they promise to live better lives and fix their mistakes. They all take a drink and become young but immediately they go back to being who they were before. The Doctor therefore concludes that people cannot change and will always go back to what they did wrong before. The two different works are written in different ways. Emerson wrote his poem as himself seeing the nature and describing it. He writes in the first person while Hawthorne wrote as a narrative. The narrator described the story how each person felt but mainly how the doctor felt. Emerson’s poem flows smoothly, is pretty to read, and has a happy feeling behind it. Hawthorne’s story however is very gloomy, depressing, and somewhat scary. The authors differ not only is styles but in thought on people’s goodness, God, and the supernatural. Hawthorne believes that people are born evil, and have always been evil. He does not believe that people can ever reach perfection due to the fact that they are human. Unlike Hawthorne, Emerson believes that people are born initially good but society is slowly corrupting. He also believes that people can become close with God through nature and spending time with nature and that people can eventually reach perfection. Even though both writers were born during the same time period, experienced similar events and tragedies and both wrote, they were very different. With different opinions, ideas, and styles of writing it would be hard to guess they were as similar as they were.