American Romanticism

1. Prepared By: Monica San Juan

2. Romantic Period
(1820-1860)
Originated in Germany, but
quickly spread to England,
France, and beyond America,
around 1820

3. Romantic
ideas
Art as an
inspiration
Art as
spiritual
Art as aesthetic
dimension of
nature and
metaphors of
organic growth
Art
expresses
universal
truth

4. 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

6. Transcendentalism Movement
The doctrine of self-reliance and
individualism developed through
the belief in the identification of
the individual soul and God.

7. 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

8. Intimately connected with
Concord, a small new England
village 32 km. west of Boston
Transcendentalism Movement

9. 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

10. 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

11. Published a magazine “The Dial”
edited by Margaret Fuller and
Emerson
Transcendentalism Movement

12. Abolitionist
Insisted on individual differences
(unique viewpoint of individual)
American writers often saw
themselves as lonely explorers
outside society and convention.
Transcendentalists

14. 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

15. 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.

16. 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.

17. 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.

18. 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

19. Henry David Thoreau
“Civil Disobedience”

20. 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)

21. 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

22. 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,

24. 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

25. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
(1807-1882)
 Best-known American poet of
his day
 responsible for the misty, a
historical, legendary sense of
the past that merged
American and European
traditions
 Wrote Evangeline, The Song of
Hiawatha and The Courtship of
Miles Standish

26. 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

27. Oliver Wendell Holmes
(1809-1894)
His work is marked by refreshing
versatility
Encompasses humorous essays
Wrote The Autocrat of the Breakfast
Table, Elsie Venner (novel), Ralph
Waldo Emerson (biography), The
Deacon’s Masterpiece (verse), The
Chambered Nautilus (philosophical),
and Old Ironsides (patriotic)

28. 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

29. Margaret Fuller
(1810-1850)
Outstanding essayist, a activist and a
social reformer
Wrote “Woman in the Nineteenth
Century”
- earliest and most American
exploration of women’s role in the
society
Stresses the importance of self-
dependence

31. 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

32. 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

33. 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!

35. 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

36. 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

37. 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)

38. 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)

39. Harriet Beecher Stowe
(1811-1896)
Wrote Life Among the Lowly
and Uncle’s Tom Cabin
(attacked slavery precisely
because it violated domestic
values)

40. 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.

41. Reference
 Outline of English American Literature