Romanticism

Prepared By: Monica San Juan

Romantic Period

(1820-1860)

Originated in Germany, but

quickly spread to England,

France, and beyond America,

around 1820

Romantic ideas

Art as an inspiration

Art as spiritual

Art as aesthetic dimension of nature and

metaphors of organic growth

Art expresses universal

truth

Self-awareness as Theme

Self and nature were one

Self-awareness is a mode of

knowledge opening up the

universe

Self-realization

Self-expression

Self-reliance

Transcendentalism Movement

The doctrine of self-reliance and

individualism developed through

the belief in the identification of

the individual soul and God.

Transcendentalism

Movement

a reaction against 18th-century

rationalism

a manifestation of the general

humanitarian trend of 19th-

century thought

based on a fundamental belief

in the unity of the world and

God

Intimately connected with

Concord, a small new England

village 32 km. west of Boston

Transcendentalism Movement

Concord

- first island settlement of the original

Massachusetts Bay Colony

- site of the first battle of the America

Revolution

Concord Hymn

- Ralph Waldo’s poem

commemorating the battle

Transcendentalism Movement

By the rude bridge that arched

the flood

Their flag to April’s breeze

unfurled,

Here once the embattled farmers

stood

And fired the shot heard round

the world.

Concord Hymn

Published a magazine “The Dial”

edited by Margaret Fuller and

Emerson

Transcendentalism Movement

Abolitionist

Insisted on individual differences

(unique viewpoint of individual)

American writers often saw

themselves as lonely explorers

outside society and convention.

Transcendentalists

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Had a religious sense of mission

For him, “To be a good minister,

it was necessary to leave a

church

His writings have spiritual and

practical, aphoristic expression

Wrote Self-Reliance, Nature

and Brahma

Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Brahma”

If the red slayer think he slay

Or the slain think he is slain,

They know not well the subtle ways

I keep, and pass, and turn again.

Far or forgot to me is near

Shadow and sunlight are the same;

The vanished gods to me appear;

And one to me are shame and fame.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Brahma”

They reckon ill who leave me out;

When me they fly, I am the wings;

I am the doubter and the doubt,

And I the hymn the Brahmin sings

The strong gods pine for my

abode,

And pine in vain the sacred Seven,

But thou, meek lover of the good!

Find me, and turn thy back on

heaven.

Ralph Waldo Emerson “Self-Reliance”

“Ne te quaesiveris extra.”

“Man is his own star; and the soul that can

Render an honest and a perfect man,

Commands all light, all influence, all fate;

Nothing to him falls early or too late.

Our acts our angels are, or good or ill,

Our fatal shadows that walk by us still.”

Epilogue to Beaumont and Fletcher’s Honest Man’s Fortune

Cast the bantling on the rocks,

Suckle him with the she-wolf’s teat;

Wintered with the hawk and fox,

Power and speed be hands and feet.

Henry David Thoreau

The subject of his many

writings is according to his

rigorous principles

Wrote Walden

- anti-travel book

- challenges the reader to

examine his or her life and

live it authentically

Henry David Thoreau

“Civil Disobedience”

Wrote poems such as crossing

Brooklyn Ferry, Out of the Cradle

Endlessly Rocking, and when Lilacs

Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d

Wrote essays such as Democratic

Vistas and Gilded Age

Walt Whitman

(1819-1892)

Walt Whitman

(1819-1892)

Largely self-thought and

innovative

Project himself into

everything that he sees and

imagines

Wrote Leaves of Grass (Song

of Myself)

- vast, energetic and natural

Walt Whitman “Leaves of Grass”

Come, said my soul,

Such verses for my Body let us write, (for we are one,)

That should I after return,

Or, long, long hence, in other spheres,

There to some group of mates the chants resuming,

(Tallying Earth’s soil, trees, winds, tumultuous waves,)

Ever with pleas’d smile I may keep on,

Ever and ever yet the verses owning—as, first, I here and now

Signing for Soul and Body, set to them my name,

The Brahmin Poets

writings of the Brahmin poets fused

American and European traditions

and sought to create a continuity of

shared Atlantic experience

Retarded the growth of a distinctive

American consciousness

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

(1807-1882)

Best-known American poet ofhis day

responsible for the misty, ahistorical, legendary sense ofthe past that mergedAmerican and Europeantraditions

Wrote Evangeline, The Song ofHiawatha and The Courtship ofMiles Standish

James Russell Lowell

(1819-1891)

Respected critic and educator

Editor of Atlantic

Wrote A Fable for critic

Liberal reformer, abolitionist and

supporter of women’s suffrage and

laws ending child labor

Wrote Biglow Papers, Big Series

Oliver Wendell Holmes

(1809-1894)

His work is marked by refreshingversatility

Encompasses humorous essays

Wrote The Autocrat of the BreakfastTable, Elsie Venner (novel), RalphWaldo Emerson (biography), TheDeacon’s Masterpiece (verse), TheChambered Nautilus (philosophical),and Old Ironsides (patriotic)

John Greenleaf Whittier

(1807-1892)

Ardent abolitionist

Respected for anti-slavery poems

such as Ichabod

His writings have sharp images, simple

constructions and ballad-like

tetrameter couplets

His best work was Snow Bound

Margaret Fuller

(1810-1850)

Outstanding essayist, a activist and asocial reformer

Wrote “Woman in the NineteenthCentury”

- earliest and most Americanexploration of women’s role in thesociety

Stresses the importance of self-dependence

Emily Dickinson

(1830-1886)

Loved nature and found deep

inspiration in the birds, animals

and plants

Most solitary literary figure of

her time

Have imagistic style in writings

Combines concrete things with

abstract ideas

Emily Dickinson

(1830-1886)

Explores the dark and hidden part

Her poetry exhibits great intelligence

and agonizing paradox

Her poems usually known by the

numbers assigned to them

Has 1775 poems

Emily Dickinson’s 288

I’m Nobody! Who are you?

Are you — Nobody — Too?

Then there’s a pair of us?

Don’t tell! they’d advertise — you

know!

How dreary — to be — Somebody!

How public — like a Frog —

To tell one’s name — the livelong

June —

To an admiring Bog!

Nathaniel Hawthorne

(1804-1864)

Wrote Scarlet Letter (classic

portrayal of Puritan America)

Hawthorne’s gentle style,

remote historical setting, and

ambiguity softened his grim

themes and contented the

general public

Nathaniel Hawthorne

(1804-1864)

Wrote The House of the Sven Gables,

The Blithedale Romance, (criticized

the society), Marble Faun

Wrote short stories such as The

Minister’s Black Veil, Young Goodman

Brown, and My Kinsman, Major

Malineux

Herman Melville

(1819-1891)

His interest in sailors’ lives

grew naturally out of his own

experiences (theme of his

novels)

Wrote Typee, Moby-Dick

(Self-Referential, a natural

epic)

Themes of death-in-life, especially

being buried alive or returning like a

vampire from the grave, appear in

many of his works

Examples are The Premature Burial,

Ligeia, The Cask of Amontillado, and

The Fall of the House of Usher

His best-known poem is The Raven

Edgar Allan Poe

(1809-1949)

Harriet Beecher Stowe

(1811-1896)

Wrote Life Among the Lowly

and Uncle’s Tom Cabin

(attacked slavery precisely

because it violated domestic

values)

Edgar Allan Poe

(1809-1949)

Many of his stories prefigure

the genres of science fiction,

horror, and fantasy so

popular today.

Poe believed that

strangeness was an essential

ingredient of beauty, and his

writing is often exotic.

Reference

Outline of English American Literature