Lecture 3 the romantic period (1820-1860)

The Romantic Movement, which originated in Germany but quickly spread to England, France, and beyond, reached America around the year of 1820. The Romantic spirit seemed particularly suited to American democracy: it stressed individualism, affirmed the value of the common person, and looked to the inspired imagination for its aesthetic and ethical values. So, American Romanticism was defined by five “I’s”: inspiration, innocence, intuition, imagination, and inner experience. It lasted from 1828 to 1895, the glory years being 1850-1855.

Transcendentalists

The country was expanding westward, but in the older cities of the northeastern states still – referred to as “New England” – the influence of early Puritan teachings remained strong. However, such authoritarian religious organizations inevitably produce dissenters. In 1836, an ex-minister named Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) published a startling book called “Nature”. In this volume, Emerson claimed that by studying and responding to nature individuals could reach a higher spiritual state without formal religion. For the next several years, Emerson’s essays (“Self-Reliance”, “The Over-Soul”, “Compensation” and others) made him extremely influential, not only upon other thinkers and writers, but upon the general population as well, thanks to a growing popular lecture circuit that brought controversial speakers to small towns across the country. In effect, Emerson’s lectures were like sermons, with their direct, motivating language. In his poetry, Emerson developed a free-form, natural style, using symbols and imagery drawn from nature. His work had an immense impact on other poets of the time.

A circle of intellectuals who were discontented with the New England establishment soon gathered around Emerson. They were known as “the Transcendentalists,” based on their acceptance of Emerson’s theories about spiritual transcendence. One of Emerson’s most gifted fellow-thinkers was Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862).

Thoreau was passionate about individuals’ learning to think for themselves and being independent, both traditional American values. He carried out this ideal by going to live by himself for two years in simple cabin beside a wooded pond, where he survived essentially by his own labors and meditated in solitude. The book he wrote about this experience, “Walden”, was published in 1854, but many of its statements about the individual’s role in society – simply put, that the dictates of an individual’s conscience should take precedence over the demands, even the laws, of society – sound radical even today.

The boston brahmins

The most popular poet in America at this time was a rather traditional writer – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882). Although his style was conservative, with strict meter and rhymes, his themes were deliberately American, and he was intent upon giving American history the dignity of classical mythology. Longfellow published over 20 books. In 1855 there appeared “The Song of Hiawatha”, a long epic poem about a young warrior of an American Indian tribe. In his poem, the author sang the harmony of nature and the harmony in the relationship of man and nature. For the first time in American literature, Indian themes gained recognition as sources of imagination, power, and originality.

Longfellow was one of a popular group called the “Fireside Poets” because they often depicted the lives of simple New Englanders in gentle, nostalgic verse. Although they came from old New England families – a sort of American “aristocracy”, they named themselves “The Boston Brahmins” – Longfellow and his circle were dedicated to America’s democratic ideals. Besides Longfellow, leading Brahmin authors included George Ripley, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Greenleaf Whittier, James Russell Lowell and some famous historians. In 1857, the club started its own magazine, the “Atlantic Monthly”, through which Boston’s literary establishment tried to influence the intellectual life and tastes of the new American republic.