American Romanticism - Renaissance

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American Romanticism - Renaissance

• that a true man belongs to no other time or
  place, but is at the center of things. Where he
  is, there is nature. He measures you, and all
  men, and all events.

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Ideologies of the Romantics

• Values feeling and intuition over reason
• Places faith in inner experience and the power of
  imagination
• Shuns the artificiality
• of civilization and seeks unspoiled nature

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Transcendentalism Intuition as a central means
of unde3rstanding reality. Emphasizes God in
nature. We can arrive at truth by communing with
the beauty and goodness of nature.

• Perfect Whole the part to the whole
• The Oversoul
• Transparent eyeball
• Solitude
• Part and parcel with God

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Ralph Waldo Emerson

• Self-Reliance
• Nature
• Each and All
• For non-conformity, the world whips you with its
  displeasure.
• To be great is to be misunderstood.
• Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of
  your principles.

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I Yield Myself to the Perfect Whole
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Characteristic Authors

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

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Henry David Thoreau

• Walden
• Resistance to Civil Government
• Walden
• The purpose of Walden is to force his readers to
  evaluate the way they have been living and
  thinking.
• Employs fables and allegories

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Thoreau's Ideals

• Re-evaluate every institution from Christianity
  to slavery
• Walden is a book on how to live wisely
• Parable of all experience
• His journals became a literary form

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Famous Quotes by Thoreau

• That government is best which governs not at
  all.
• if the law causes you to be an agent of
  injustice to another, I say, break the law!
• The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.

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• Emersons greatest challenge to contemporary
  thought may be his view of evolution as a
  purposeful natural processan idea vehemently
  rejected today. He argues that evolution harbors
  its own divine spirit and, therefore, that the
  universe is bursting with meaning. In his own
  time, Emerson was accused of being a pantheist,
  or a believer in the idea that nature is God, but
  that accusation misses its mark. For Emerson,
  nature is not God but the body of Gods
  soul"nature," he writes, is "mind precipitated."
  Emerson feels that to fully realize ones role in
  this respect is to be in paradise. He ends
  "Nature" with these words

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Nature

• "Every moment instructs, and every object for
  wisdom is infused into every form. It has been
  poured into us as blood it convulsed us as pain
  it slid into us as pleasure it enveloped us in
  dull, melancholy days, or in days of cheerful
  labor we did not guess its essence until after a
  long time."

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Paradox Linking seemingly contradictory elements

• I am not solitary while I read and write, though
  nobody is with me.
• But every night come out these envoys of beauty,
  and light the universe with their admonishing
  smile.