American Romanticism: An Introduction

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Romanticism its not just for Valentines Day
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Basic Principles of Philosophy

• Romanticism is the name given to those schools of
  thought that value feeling and intuition over
  reason.
• Romanticism (especially in Europe) developed in
  part as a reaction against Rationalism.

• In the dirty wake of the Industrial Revolution,
  people
• had come to realize the limits of reason.

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Implications of Philosophy

• Listen to your heart and your senses.
• People are basically good.
• Civilization and society corrupts.
• Nature is the best teacher.

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Romanticism in Europe

• The Romantics came to believe that the
  imagination was able to capture truths that the
  rational mind could not reach.
• These truths were usually accompanied by powerful
  emotions associated with natural, unspoiled
  beauty.
• To the Romantics, imagination, spontaneity,
  individual feelings, and wild nature were of
  greater value than reason, logic, planning, and
  cultivation.

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Music

• Themes
• Nature
• Supernatural
• National identity

To hold eternity in the palm of your hand, And
heaven in a wildflower (William Blake)
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Romantic Composers

• Ludwig van Beethoven
• Franz Schubert
• Felix Mendelssohn
• Frederic Chopin
• Franz Liszt
• Richard Wagner

• Giuseppe Verdi
• Johannes Brahms
• Peter Tchaikovsky
• Claude Debussy
• Richard Strauss
• Sergei Rachmaninoff

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Ludwig van Beethoven
As a pianist, it was reported, he had fire,
brilliance and fantasy as well as depth of
feeling.
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Franz Liszt
"Music embodies feeling without forcing it to
contend and combine with thought... Music
presents at once the intensity and the expression
of feeling. It is the embodied and intelligible
essence of feeling, capable of being apprehended
by our senses.
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Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky
It is a musical confession of the soul, which
unburdens itself through sounds just as a lyric
poet expresses himself through poetry.
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Listening

• Listen to this excerpt by Wagner.
• What emotions does it evoke?
• What story do you think the music is telling?
• How do you imagine it being created? Performed?

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Viewing

• As you view the next few slides, jot down words
  that come to mind. Think specifically about
• Emotions
• Human beings place in the world
• The importance of nature
• Philosophies of life

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(No Transcript)
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Thomas Cole
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Thomas Cole
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Albert Bierstadt
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What words came to mind?

• Patriotic
• Beautiful
• Nature
• battle/ war
• Honor
• Frontier life

• Wilderness
• Unspoiled nature
• Individual freedom
• Smallness of man
• Turbulent emotions

What other words came to mind?
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Romantic Art

• Common themes/ideas
• looking back on past
• worth of the individual
• individual freedom
• contemplating nature
• unspoiled nature
• natures beauty
• turbulent emotions
• Tell me what you notice.

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Literature

• William Blake
• William Wordsworth
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge
• John Keats
• Lord Byron
• Percy Bysshe Shelley

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Characteristics of Literature

• Nature settings
• Archaic language
• Common experiences
• Appeal to senses and emotion
• Truth and goodness prevail

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Literature Themes

• Individualism and freedom
• Reverence of Nature (vs. civilization)
• Cultivation of the Imagination and creativity
• Emotion (vs. reason)
• Look to past for wisdom/distrust progress
• Supernatural (vs. rational, scientific)

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Lets review.American Romanticism
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What IS American Romanticism?

• Looks backward to the wisdom of the past and
  distrusts progress
• Finds beauty and truth in exotic locales, 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 folk
  culture

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What IS American Romanticism?

• Values feeling and emotion 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 natures beauty as a path to
  spiritual and moral development

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American Novel and the Wilderness Experience

• Initially, the novel reflected issues in America
  westward expansion, the growth of a nationalist
  spirit, and the rapid spread of cities.
• A new heroThe rationalist heroexemplified by a
  real-life

figure like Ben Franklinwas worldly, educated,
sophisticated, and bent on making a place for
himself in civilization
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Characteristics of the American Romantic Hero

• Is young, or possesses youthful qualities
• Is innocent and pure
• Has a sense of honor based not on societys rules
  but on some higher principle
• Has a knowledge of people and of life based on
  deep, intuitive understanding, not on formal
  learning
• Loves nature and avoids town life
• Quests for some higher truth in the natural world

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Fireside Poetry

• Literary giants of the period who were from New
  England and used heavy/obvious symbolism

• Henry Wadsworth, a Harvard professor
• John Greenleaf Whittier, a Quaker farmer
• James Russell Lowell, wealthy leader
• Oliver Wendell Holmes, a physician

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Transcendentalism
can be understood in one sense by their context
-- by what they were rebelling against, what they
saw as the current situation and therefore as
what they were trying to be different from
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They were AGAINST

• Government
• Slavery
• Rationalist views, corpse-cold
• The old assumptions of religion
• Sexism, misogyny

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A Different, Yet Romantic View

• All things are a reflection of the Divine Soul,
  or the Over-Soul
• Most withdrew from society, literally
• Moved to the Walden Pond
• Revered Nature

"We will walk on our own feet we will work with
our own hands we will speak our own minds...A
nation of men will for the first time exist,
because each believes himself inspired by the
Divine Soul which also inspires all men."
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Key Ideas

• Over-Soul, or Divine Soul
• Individualism
• Simplicity! Simplicity! Simplicity
• Passive Resistance to Justice
• Civil Disobedience
• Freedom
• Truth

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Interesting Ideas/Quotes

• That government is best which governs least
• To appreciate beauty, to find the best in
  others.
• To leave the world a bit better, whether by a
  healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed
  social condition

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Ralph Waldo Emerson

• He wore straw hat, stout shoes, strong gray
  trousers, to brave shrub-oaks and smilax, and to
  climb a tree for a hawk's or a squirrel's nest.
  He waded into the pool for the water-plants, and
  his strong legs were no insignificant part of his
  armor."

Thoreaus description of Emerson
The Father of Transcendentalism
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Henry David Thoreau

• I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any
  neighbor, in a house which I built myself, on the
  shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts,
  and earned my living by the labor of my hands
  only. from Walden

Emersons Protégé
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Dark Romantics, or Anti-Transcendentalists

• Not everyone shared the Transcendentalists
  optimistic view
• Some people, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne,
  burrowed into the depths of our common nature
  and found the area not always shimmering, but
  often dusky
• So, authors (Poe, Hawthorne, Dickinson, etc.)
  began to express a darker side

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Edgar Allan Poe

• Father of the detective story
• Began writing gothic tales and poems
• Famous works The Black Cat, The Cask of
  Amontillado, The Raven, etc.

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Emily Dickinson

• A recluse who did not write for publication
• Wrote out of a personal need to wrestle with
  questions about death, immortality, and the soul

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Nathaniel Hawthorne

• Most prevalent genre psychological romance
• Themes include witchcraft, sin, hypocrisy,
  guilt, and insanity
• Major Works include The Scarlet Letter and The
  House of Seven Gables

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Works Cited

• MetMuseum. Works of Art American Paintings and
  Sculpture. Retrieved August 10, 2004 from
  http//www.metmuseum.org/Works_of_Art/
• Pearson Education. Timeless Voices, Timeless
  Themes The American Experience. SaddleRiver,
  2004.