American Romanticism

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American Romanticism
1820-1860
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Characteristics of Romanticism

• Contemplating natures beauty is the path to
  spiritual and moral development.
• Values feeling and intuition over reason
• Looks backward to the wisdom of the past, shuns
  progress

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The Age of Reason or The Enlightenment

• Founded on
• Deism
• Logic
• Observation as means of obtaining Truth
• Inalienable rights

• Contributed to
• Industrialization Growth of cities factories
• Mobility and breakup of families and communities
• American expansion
• (Lewis and Clark and Manifest Destiny)
• More encounters with Native Americans

Albert Bierstadt
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Romanticism Reaction To The Age of Reason
Age of Reason
Romanticism
Realism Idealism/Utopia
Patrician Classicism Glorification of the common man
Dominion over the Native American Recognition of the nobility of the primitive
Reliance on reason Credibility of intuition and reflection
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(Continued)
Age of Reason
Romanticism
Logic Always facts to counter fear and doubt Imagination to engender faith and hope
Mans dominion over Nature Manifest Destiny bring to serve mankind Mans interdependence upon Nature Generative, antidote mystical unknown
Deism De-emphasize organized religion Transcendentalism God always available-Over-Soul
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The City was a Place of . . .
Age of Reason
Romanticism
Industrial Revolution Success Self-realization Civilization Poor Work Conditions Moral Ambiguity Corruption Death
Romanticism Often Seen As A Journey
--The journey from the city to the country
--The journey from rational
thought to the imagination
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The Fireside Poets
The Most Popular American Poets of Their Time
John Greenleaf Whittier, William Cullen Bryant,
James Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes

• Their poems were often read aloud at the fireside
  as family entertainment.

• It is poetry that seeks a higher truth from the
  natural world.

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Literature
Folktales, regional writer Washington Irving
Noble Savage James Fennimore Cooper American
Novelists looked to westward expansion and the
frontier for inspiration.
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Two Schools of Philosophical Thought

• The Transcendentalists
• vs.
• The Anti-Transcendentalists

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The Transcendentalists(The New England
Renaissance)

• Early 19th Century Religious Philosophical
  Movement
• Dedicated to belief that divinity is everywhere
• Found especially in natural world
• Promoted personalized direct relationship with
  the divine
• Conducted in a place of formal structured
  religion

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The Transcendentalists(Continued)

• Optimistic view of the world
• The natural world is a doorway to the spiritual
  or ideal world
• Self-Reliance
• Rely on your own thought
• Seek not to follow others

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Transcendentalists Beckon Us To Leave Behind
The Hurried Technological World
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To venture forth to the natural world To
find our inner peace To reconnect with all
mankind Nature
Use intuition to find truth and connect with the
spiritual realm
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Be Keen Observer of Nature Stay Quiet Be
Still To Hear Her Lessons
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The Anti-Transcendentalists

• Works of Hawthorne, Melville Poe
• Acknowledged existence of sin
• Pain evil in human life
• Formed counterpoint to the optimism of the
  transcendentalists
• Regarded as the dark side in the eyes of
  Transcendentalists who use the force

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The Force vs. The Dark Side

• Transcendentalists
• Idealists/Individualist
• Intuition
• Everything is a reflection
• of the divine soul
• Nature is good even
• Man is good
• Man Nature in partnership
• Embraces science as part of
• nature

• Anti-transcendentalists
• Realists
• Experience
• Spirituality based on Puritanism/Calvinism
• Nature is indifferent Man is evil
• Mans dark side
• Suspicious of science and technology