American

Romanticism1800 - 1870

We will walk with our own feetwe will work with our own handswe will speak our own minds

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

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, even champion today.

Rationalism vs. Romanticism

The rationalists believed the city to be a place to find success and self-realization

The romantics associated the countryside with independence, moral clarity, and healthful living.

To a large degree, Romanticism was a reaction against the Enlightenment or

Age of Reason, especially its emphasis on formal propriety (what is proper),

classical style (emphasis on order), and decorum (how one behaviors; certain

rules of behavior; think on Franklin’s 13 virtues to moral perfection).

Historical Background

Optimism

Successful revolt against English rule

Room to grow

Frontier

Vast expanse

Freedom

No geographic limitations

Characteristics The Five I’s

Imagination

Intuition

Idealism

Inspiration

Individuality

Characteristics Expanded

Values feeling and intuition over reason

Places faith in inner experience and the power of the imagination

Shuns the artificiality of civilization and seeks unspoiled nature

Prefers youthful innocence to educated sophistication

Champions individual freedom and the worth of the individual

Contemplates nature’s beauty as a path to spiritual and moral development

Characteristics (continued)

Looks backward to the wisdom of the past and distrusts progress

Finds beauty and truth in exotic locals, the supernatural realm, and the inner world of the imagination

Sees poetry as the highest expression of the imagination

Finds inspiration in myth, legend, and fold culture

Subject Matter

Quest for beauty

Escape from daily troubles

Journey to freedom, represented in nature as opposed to the oppressive city

Use of far-away, imaginative settings

Supernatural, myth, legend & folklore

Literary Techniques

Remote settings

Improbable plots

Experimentation in new forms of writing

ROMANTICISM: THE MOVEMENT

Expanded Romanticism is the cult of the individual--the cultural

and psychological birth of the I--the Self

Belief in an inner spark of divinity that links one human being to another and all human beings to the larger “Truth”

In poetry, visual art, and music, artists became increasingly preoccupied with articulating the personal experience that becomes, in turn, a representative one

IMAGINATION becomes the source of artistic vision/creativity (during the neo-classical age, imagination was linked to “fancy,” which implied the fantastic, fictive, and even false)

ROMANTICISM: THE MOVEMENT

The artist (especially, the poet): takes on quasi-religious status not only as prophet and moral leader

The poet/artist as a divinely inspired vehicle through which Nature and the common man find their voices

ROMANTICISM: THE MOVEMENT

aesthetic changes: individuality translated into the revolution of feeling against form

Poets, painters, and musicians no longer trying to make their expression fit conventional forms, but carving out new forms to capture their feelings and thoughts

Emphasis on the language of the Soul

ROMANTICISM: THE MOVEMENT

For the Romantic, nature was a constant companion and teacher--both benign and tyrannical

Nature became

the stage on which the human drama was played

the context in which man came to understand his place in the universe

the transforming agent which harmonized the individual soul with what the Transcendentalists would call the Over-Soul.

ROMANTICISM: THE MOVEMENT

Throughout all of Romantic literature, music, and art, Nature is a dynamic presence, a character who speaks in a language of symbols at once mysterious and anthropomorphic (i.e. speaking with a voice similar to human voice, i.e. sharing human qualities and characteristics, especially in personification of natural objects, phenomena, etc.)

allows man to come into dialogue with the life-force

Sub-Movements of Romanticism

Gothicism

Washington Irving

“Rip Van Winkle”

Edgar Allan Poe

“The Fall of the House of Usher”

“The Raven”

Nathaniel Hawthorne

“The Minister’s Black Veil”

Sub-Movements of Romanticism

Transcendentalism

Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Nature”

“Self-Reliance”

Henry David Thoreau

Walden

“Resistance to Civil Government”

American Gothic: The Realm of Darkness

Edgar Allen Poe with Hawthorne and Melville known and anti-Transcendentalists

Explored conflicts between good and evil, psychological effects of guilt and sin, and madness

Transcendentalism

The idea that in determining the ultimate reality of God, the universe, the self, and other important matters, one must transcend, or go beyond, everyday human experience in the physical world.

Romantic Poets

William Cullen Bryant“Thanatopsis”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow“The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls”

“The Cross of Snow”

Oliver Wendell Holmes“The Chambered Nautilus”

Romantic Poets

Emily Dickinson

“Heart! We will forget him!”

“Some keep the Sabbath going to Church”

“Tell all the Truth but tell it slant”

Walt Whitman

“I Hear America Singing”

Song of Myself

Romantic Art

Visual Art: Examples

Bibliography

This PowerPoint is a combination of slides from three online PowerPoints.

SOURCES:

project810.files.wordpress.com/2008/02/romanticism.ppt

www.newauburn.k12.wi.us/english/amerlit/Romaticism.ppt

www.westga.edu/.../Powerpoint%20Presentations/AMERICAN%20ROMANTICISM.ppt