Download American Romanticism: A Flowering of Individuality and Creativity and more Summaries Literature in PDF only on Docsity! AMERICAN ROMANTICISM: INTRODUCTION “The heart, like the mind, has a memory. And in it are kept the most precious keepsakes.” HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW 1807–1882 ROMANTICISM: THE MOVEMENT - Romanticism dominated cultural thought from the last decade of the 18th century well into the first decades of the 20th century - First appearance in Germany in the 1770s (“Sturm und Drang”); flowering in England in the 1790s; importation to America from the 1820s onward • To a large degree, Romanticism was a reaction against the Enlightenment or Age of Reason, especially its emphasis on formal propriety, classical style, and decorum ROMANTICISM: THE MOVEMENT • Question: What comes to mind or what do you associate with the term “Romanticism”? ROMANTICISM: THE MOVEMENT • Although we usually associate a quaint or exaggerated effusion of emotion with Romanticism (hence, the shift in meaning of the word “Romantic” to everything relating love…), the Romantic age brought about concepts of the individual and his/her relationship to the world/society that we still largely subscribe to and even champion today. An incredible flowering of masterpieces The glory years were 1850-1855. There was an incredible flowering of masterpieces in this era: Emerson's Representative Men, Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, The House of Seven Gables, Melville's Moby-Dick and Pierre, Thoreau's Walden, and Whitman's Leaves of Grass. Aesthetically, the romantics were in a state of revolt primarily against the restraints of classicism and formalism. Form, particularly traditional literary forms, mattered much less than inspiration, enthusiasm, and emotion. Good literature should have heart, not rules (although it is never so simple as that.) ROMANTICISM: THE MOVEMENT • The artist (especially the poet) takes on quasi-religious status not only as prophet but as moral leader • The poet/artist is a divinely inspired vehicle through which Nature and the common man find their voices ROMANTICISM: THE MOVEMENT One of the defining aspects of Romanticism was concern for the common man. This came from both the democratic changes of the age of revolution, as well as an interest in folk culture. These romantics confronted the distinctively American pressures for conformity and definitions of success in terms of money. They spoke out, to some degree, against slavery, promoting the ideals of Jacksonian democracy, that "any man can do anything" (the unspoken part of this was if he's white and educated). They sought to create a distinctive American literary voice; it was time for the cultural revolution to follow the political one. They felt compelled to declare cultural and individual independence from Europe, even though they had little idea of what form that could take. ROMANTICISM: THE MOVEMENT • Aesthetic changes: individuality translated into the revolution of feeling against form • Poets, painters, and musicians were no longer trying to make their expression fit conventional forms, but carving out new forms to capture their feelings and thoughts • The emphasis on the language of the soul AMERICAN ROMANTICISM • Often associated with the terms “American Renaissance” and “Transcendentalism” • Poets: William Cullen Bryant, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson • Prose Writers: Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Herman Melville. AMERICAN ROMANTICISM: THE POETRY • William Cullen Bryant, “To a Waterfowl” and “The Prairies” • Lydia Howard Huntley Sigourney, “Niagara” • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “A Psalm of Life” and “The Fire of Drift-wood”
