I still don't know if I can control myself. I know you can. You have to tell me what you're thinking. Which going to disappear. I don't know how long I've waited for you. This is not the kind of romantic we are going to talk about. The essence of romanticism is the ability to wander and reflect. The American literary romanticism movement took place between the 18 20s and 18 60s and was inspired largely by a similar English movement from the previous generation.
Like its English counterpart, American Romanticism was in response to the empiricism and logic of the Enlightenment era, in which people believed that the world could be explained through rational calculation. Romantic authors also wrote in response to the urbanization, structure and environmental side effects of the Industrial Revolution, American romanticism was strongly characterized by intense emotions, creativity, imagination and what is known as the sublime in early American literature. These concepts are often applied to nature, the source of all wisdom and knowledge.
Romantic authors viewed nature as the primary channel in which self reflection and self realisation could take place. A person could achieve a greater understanding of the world around themselves by spending time in quiet contemplation. Romantic heroes are often common people who sought refuge from the constraints of society for the boundless sanctuary of nature. Some of the main players during this movement included Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson and Herman Melville. For romanticists, there was something incredibly didactic about nature, its beauty, its terror and its wonder possessed for these authors, a means of understanding both the world around them and themselves.
For example, the narrator and William Cohen Bryants to a waterfall. One of the earliest examples of American romantic poetry does more than merely describe the flight of a beautiful seabird, but also takes time to reflect on what this experience has taught him as the bird departs. They were gone, the abyss of heaven has swallowed up thy form, yet on my heart deeply has sunk. The lesson that was given and shall not soon depart. He who from zone to zone guides through the boundless sky, that certain flight in the long way that I must try it alone will leave my steps are right.
Washington Irving was the first major American writer who could make a living wholly on his writing. He is also a major figure in the development of the short story. His short story, Rip Van Winkle deals with such romantic themes as the preference of the country to the city. While the legend of Sleepy Hollow delves into the gothic and supernatural, hinting at an unseen world that dwells beyond moral comprehension is named Ichabod Crane.
It was the kind of. Just like other romantic authors of his day, Nathaniel Hawthorne centered his literary works around imaginative, emotional and even terror themes with the intent to impart some wisdom to his readers. Where Hawthorne seems to delineate from his peers is in the use of highly puritanical devices. Unlike other romantic authors who believe that man was inherently good and that it was civilization that corrupted man Hawthorne preached against man's natural tendency to sin, and many of his words explored the symbolism and deep psychological implications that accompanied mortal sin, guilt and retribution.
The Scarlet Letter, for example, is not only a cautionary tale, but it is also considered a Gothic romantic novel in the sense that it contains several depictions of imposing landscapes and architecture. It is further explores the dark recesses of the human mind in such a way that goes beyond rational explanation. This fascination with the fallibility of man and man's proneness, descent and self-destruction came to be known as gothic or dark romanticism. Herman Melville, meanwhile, uses five years experience at sea as inspiration for one of the most notable American romantic novels in history, Moby Dick.
Some of the major themes in this work include the destructive power of nature, the ambiguity behind good and evil, and the debate on the existence of God. Melville employs highly imaginative and gothic descriptions of the sea, the enigmatic white whale and even some of his human characters to create a menacing and even supernatural air about the story. Consider the nature imagery Melville uses when describing a scar on the face of his protagonist, Captain Ahab, a man who embodies the beautiful yet dangerous elements of the sublime.
It resembled that perpendicular scene sometimes made in the straight Laffite trunk of a great tree when the upper lightning caringly darts down it and without wrenching a single twig, peels and grooves out the bark from top to bottom, running off into the soil, leaving the tree still greenly alive, but branded destroyed.
I think you've got Moby Dick, sir. You're going to school of squid where there are squid or a whale, apparels torpedos. Like other romantic authors, Edgar Allan Poe placed a heavy emphasis on landscape and the intense emotions that produced in his works. However, Poe's Gothic approach to romantic themes was meant to create a deeply disturbing impression upon his characters, attempting to connect readers with the sublime, a phenomenon whose beauty and grandeur is only matched by its potential for danger.
For example, in the House of Usher, the narrator's first encounter with the landscape surrounding the melancholy house render him unable to explain his feelings rationally. I looked upon the scene before me upon the mere house and the simple landscape features of the domain, upon the bleak walls, upon the vacant. I like windows upon a few rank sedges and upon a few white trunks of decaying trees with an utter depression of soul, which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after dream of the reveller upon opium, in essence, the feeling of coming down from a bad strip as much like the feel of Gothic literature.
It is said that in the 18 30s, a group of young people in New England began a revolution, unlike many, another revolution that had been and that would be this one involved no physical weaponry. Instead, as a leading revolutionary, Ralph Waldo Emerson noted years later, the young men were born with knives in their brain, a tendency to introversion, self-deception and anonymizing and motives. Transcendentalism was an intellectual simmi religious movement that emerged in New England at roughly the same period as romanticism heyday in American literature in the late 18th, 20s and 30s.
The basic idea of transcendentalism is the exploration of a naturalistic and unstructured spirituality. It is interesting to note, however, that both transcendentalism and romanticism are built on the foundation of puritanism, which pervasively touched every aspect of American life. Take, for example, these words from the Puritan Jonathan Edwards personal narrative. God's Excellency, his wisdom, his purity and love seemed to appear in everything in the sun, moon and stars, in the clouds and blue sky, in the grass, flowers, trees in the water and all nature which used gritli to fix my mind.
It is striking to note Edwards emerging focus on nature's reflection of the sublime, as would be seen in the American romantic movement. While his striving to express God and to understand his nature can also be seen as somewhat of a precursor to the transcendentalist movement. In the book The Spirituality of American Transcendentalists, it is explained that the transcendentalists were children of the Unitarians who emerged from the liberal wing of Puritanism even as they rebelled against their past. The transcendentalists continued to embody these Puritan tendencies and qualities like their ancestors, too, they were haunted by their sense of morality and the moral law, and they thought of the task of spreading their new gospel as a vocation, a calling by God.
The Transcendentalist preached with a confidence and an optimism that matched their ancestors sense of intimacy with God.
The first thing we have to say respecting what are called new views here in New England at the present time is that they are not new. But the very oldest of thoughts cast into the mold of these new times, what is popularly called transcendentalism among us is idealism. Idealism, as it appears in 1842, transcendentalism was pioneered by the great essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose spiritual journey as a Unitarian minister eventually brought him to the conclusion that institutionalized religion was a barrier to an individual's full union with God.
We live in succession, in division, in parts and particles.
Meantime, within man is the soul of the whole. The wise silence, the universal beauty to which every part and particle is equally related, the eternal one. We see the world piece by piece as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree, but the whole of which these are the shining parts. Is the sole. After quitting his mastership, Emerson turned to writing and publishing and published the groundbreaking essay Nature in eighteen thirty six, establishing the basic beliefs of what would soon become transcendentalism.