The Age of American Romanticism

American Romanticism: 1800–1860
(--information adapted from Elements of Literature)

A Timeline of Selected Events during the Period Known As American Romanticism
1798 - William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge publish Lyrical Ballads, a landmark of English Romanticism (traditionally considered the beginning of the English Romantic Movement)
1817 - William Cullen Bryant publishes Thanatopsis
1828 - Noah Webster publishes a landmark dictionary of American English
1833 - John Greenleaf Whittier publishes Justice and Expediency, in which he calls for the abolition of slavery
1841 - Ralph Waldo Emerson publishes his first collection, Essays, including Self-Reliance and The Over-Soul
1845 - Edgar Allan Poe publishes The Raven and Other Poems
- United States annexes Texas (leads to war with Mexico, 1846–1848)
1850 - Nathaniel Hawthorne publishes The Scarlet Letter
1851 - Herman Melville publishes The Whale, or Moby-Dick
1854 - Henry David Thoreau publishes Walden
1855 - Walt Whitman publishes the first edition of his book of poems, Leaves of Grass
1858 - Emily Dickinson begins to copy her poems into bound booklets

Reading List
The Devil and Tom Walker by Washington Irving
Thanatopsis by William Cullen Bryant from Nature by Ralph Waldo Emerson from Self-Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson from Walden, or Life in the Woods by Henry David Thoreau
Civil Disobedience
-from Resistance to Civil Government by Henry David Thoreau
-from On Nonviolent Resistance by Mohandas K. Gandhi
-from Letter from Birmingham City Jail by Martin Luther King, Jr.
Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment by Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Pit and the Pendulum by Edgar Allan Poe
The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe from Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

Active Reading Anticipatory Question: According to Romantic views, how do the powers of the imagination, individual feelings, and nature help us discover truths about ourselves that may elude the rational mind?
Romanticism: The Basics
In general, Romanticism is the name given to those schools of thought that value feeling and intuition over reason.
Romanticism, especially in Europe, developed in part as a reaction against rationalism. In the sooty wake of the Industrial Revolution, with its squalid cities and wretched working conditions, people had come to realize the limits of reason.
Romanticism had a strong influence on literature, music, and painting in Europe from the mid-eighteenth century well into the nineteenth century. To the Romantic mind, poetry was the highest embodiment of the imagination.
By the beginning of the nineteenth century, Americans had forged an independent nation, but they had not yet created their own cultural identity. A new generation of writers, who called themselves Romantics and Transcendentalists, took the first giant steps in that direction.
Certain subjects became characteristic of Romantic literature, such as the study of nature as a means to self-knowledge. Romantics associated the countryside (nature) with independence, moral clarity, and healthful living. In “The Chambered Nautilus,” Oliver Wendell Holmes compares the life of a sea creature to the progress of the human soul.
The Romantics believed that the imagination was able to discover truths that the rational mind could not reach. These truths were usually accompanied by powerful emotion and associated with natural, unspoiled beauty. To the Romantics, imagination, individual feelings, and wild nature were of greater value than reason, logic, and cultivation. The Romantics did not flatly reject logical thought as invalid for all purposes; but for the purpose of art, they placed a new premium on intuitive, “felt” experience.
American Romantic Poetry
The American Romantic novelists looked for new subject matter and new themes, but the opposite tendency appears in the works of the Romantic poets.
Romantic poets wanted to prove that Americans were not unsophisticated hicks by working solidly within European literary traditions rather than by crafting a unique American voice. Even when they constructed poems with American settings and subject matter, the American Romantic poets used typically English themes, meter, and imagery.
The Fireside Poets—as the Boston group of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and James Russell Lowell was called—were, in their own time and for many decades afterward, the most popular poets America had ever produced. They were called Fireside Poets because their poems were read aloud at the fireside as family entertainment. They were also sometimes called Schoolroom Poets, because their poems were for many years memorized in every American classroom. The Fireside Poets were unable to recognize the poetry of the future, though. Whittier’s response in 1855 to the first volume of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass was to throw the book into the fire. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s response was much more farsighted: “I greet you,” Emerson wrote to this maverick new poet, “at the beginning of a great career.”

Emerson and Transcendentalism: The American Roots
At the heart of America’s coming-of-age were the Transcendentalists, who were led by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson was the most influential and best-known member of the Transcendentalists, largely because of his lectures and books.
Transcendental refers to 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.
As developed by Emerson, Transcendentalism blended ideas from Europe and Asia into a new American concept that included Puritan thought, the beliefs of the eighteenth-century religious revivalist Jonathan Edwards, and the Romantic tradition exemplified by William Cullen Bryant.
For Emerson, Transcendentalism was not a new philosophy but “the very oldest of thoughts cast into the mold of these new times.” That “oldest of thoughts” was idealism (from Greek philosopher Plato’s work). Idealists said that true reality was found in ideas rather than in the world as perceived by senses. Idealists sought the permanent reality that underlies physical appearances.
Emerson’s mystical view of the world sprang not from logic but from intuition. Intuition is our capacity to know things spontaneously and immediately through our emotions rather than through our reasoning abilities. Intuitive thought—the kind Emerson believed in—contrasts with the rational thinking of someone like Benjamin Franklin. Franklin did not gaze on nature and feel the presence of a Divine Soul; Franklin looked at nature and saw something to be examined scientifically and used to help humanity.
Emerson believed that we can find God directly in nature: God is good, and God works through nature. For Emerson, 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.
According to Emerson, we are capable of evil because we are separated from a direct, intuitive knowledge of God. But if we simply trust ourselves—that is, trust in the power each of us has to know God directly—then we will realize that each of us is also part of the Divine Soul, the source of all good.
The Dark Romantics
Some people think of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Edgar Allan Poe as anti-Transcendentalists, because their views of the world seem so profoundly opposed to the optimistic views of Emerson and his followers. But these Dark Romantics, as they are known, had much in common with the Transcendentalists. Both groups valued intuition over logic and reason. Both groups, like the Puritans before them, saw signs and symbols in all events.
The Dark Romantics didn’t disagree with Emerson’s belief that spiritual facts lie behind the appearances of nature; they just did not think that those facts are necessarily good or harmless. Emerson, they felt, had taken the ecstatic, mystical elements of Puritan thought and ignored its dark side—its emphasis on Original Sin, its sense of the innate wickedness of human beings, and its notions of predestination. The Dark Romantics came along to correct the balance. In their works they explored the conflict between good and evil, the psychological effects of guilt and sin, and even madness in the human psyche.
For Poe, the Romantic emphasis upon intuition and the individual’s interior world of intense feeling leads to an interest in the irrational elements of the human mind; thus, the Romantic journey often is a psychological voyage to the imagination in much of Poe’s work.
Herman Melville finds in the mysteries of nature and human nature a mixture of both good and evil in his novel Moby-Dick.
The American Novel and a New Kind of Literary Hero
During the Romantic period, the big question about American literature was: Would American writers continue to imitate the English and European models, or would they finally develop a distinctive literature of their own?
The development of the American novel coincided with westward expansion, with the growth of a nationalist spirit, and with the rapid spread of cities. All these factors tended to reinforce the idealization of frontier life. America provided a sense of limitless frontiers that Europe, so long settled, simply did not possess.
James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851) advanced the American novel genre by exploring uniquely American settings and characters: frontier communities, American Indians, backwoodsmen, and the wilderness of western New York and Pennsylvania.
James Fenimore Cooper is best known for his five "Leather-Stocking Tales" (The Pioneers, The Last of the Mohicans, The Prairie, The Pathfinder, The Deerslayer). Cooper created the first American heroic figure: Natty Bumppo (also known as Hawkeye, Deerslayer, and Leather-stocking). Natty was a heroic, virtuous, skillful frontiersman whose simple morality, love of nature, distrust of town life, and almost superhuman resourcefulness mark him as a true Romantic hero. Cooper’s Natty Bumppo is a triumph of American innocence and an example of one of the most important outgrowths of the early American novel: the American Romantic Hero. The typical hero of American Romantic fiction was youthful, innocent, intuitive, and close to nature. By today’s standards the hero was also hopelessly uneasy with women, who were usually seen (by male writers, at least) to represent civilization and the impulse to “domesticate.”
Most Europeans had an image of the American as unsophisticated and uncivilized. Cooper and other Romantic novelists who followed him demonstrated how virtue existed in American innocence, not in European sophistication. Eternal truths were waiting to be discovered not in dusty libraries, crowded cities, or glittering court life, they argued, but in the American wilderness that was unknown and unavailable to Europeans.
20th and 21st century versions of Natty Bumppo include the Lone Ranger, Superman, Luke Skywalker, Indiana Jones, and many other western, detective, and fantasy heroes.
Review Questions:
What were the values of the (American) Romantics, and how did these values affect the American imagination?
Who were the Transcendentalists, and how do their beliefs still influence American life?
What darker side of human life was recognized by some major American Romantics?