American Romanticism I hear America Singing Walt Whitman

1
American RomanticismI hear America SingingWalt
Whitman

2
American Romantic Period

• Period Running from 1800-1865
• True American movement
• Romantics were a part of the Manifest Destiny
  era. The expansion of the west and vastness of
  nature and America. The Lewis and Clark
  expedition was in full swing and it was this idea
  of the Noble Savage taken further. There was vast
  expansion and the world was good.
• The discovery of a distinctive American voice.

3
Romantic Movement

• 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 aesthetic
  and ethical values.

4
Romantic Traits

• 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 natures beauty as a path to
  spiritual and moral development
• 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

5
Romantic Writers

• Walt Whitman
• Washington Irving
• Edgar Allan Poe
• Nathaniel Hawthorne
• Herman Melville
• Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Henry David Thoreau
• Walt Whitman
• Emily Dickinson
• Frederick Douglass