ROMANTI

CISM

1800-1860

ROMANTICISM• favors feeling and intuition over reason.

• The imagination is able to apprehend truths that the rational (scientific) mind can not reach

• – not a complete rejection of rational thought

• Tried to contemplate the natural world until dull reality fell away to reveal the underlying beauty and truth.

ROMANTICISM• Champions individual freedoms• Distrusts progress • Thinks poetry is highest form of

imagination• Enjoys myths, legends, and folk

culture• Seeks unspoiled nature• Trusts inner experiences

INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTIONA response to Rationalism, which took

place during the Industrial Revolution.Romanticism grew as a response to escape this grimy, sooty, noisy reality.

Characterized by squalid cities and wretched working conditions.

This escape was found in the more “natural” past, the supernatural, or in old legends and folklore.

TENETS (BELIEFS)• Cities represented moral ambiguity,

corruption, and death.

• Truths were accompanied by powerful emotion and were associated by natural, unspoiled beauty.

• Valued imagination, spontaneity, individual feelings, and wild nature over reason, logic, planning, and cultivation.

POETRY• Poetry was the highest and most

sublime embodiment of the imagination; very important to Romantic writers.

• Poetry contrasts with science - science destroys the truth it claimed to seek.

• Beauty cannot be achieved or arrived at scientifically.

THE ROMANTIC JOURNEY• A journey to the countryside• Nature is associated with

independence, moral clarity, and healthful living.

• For Gothic/Dark Romantic Writers, this journey is one into the imagination.

THE ROMANTIC HERO• The rational hero was worldly,

sophisticated, well educated, and bent on making a place in civilization (cities).

• The romantic hero is youthful, innocent, intuitive, and close to nature.

The embodiment of the American frontiersman.

FIRESIDE POETRY• Titled as such because families often

gathered to read poetry at the hearth (fireside) of homes.

One of the few forms of entertainment available during this time.

• Produced some of America’s most famous poets: Longfellow, Whittier, Holmes, Lowell.

• Modeled after European literary traditions – English themes, meter, and imagery.

FIRESIDE POETRY CONT’D

• Rhythm is very regular – “Dum-de-dum”

• Subject matter was comforting, rather than challenging

• Uniquely American in the sense that they chose American subject matter:

American folk themesAmerican landscapes/settingsAbolitionist issuesAmerican Indian cultureCelebrations of American people, places, and events