Romanticism in America
The European Romantic movement reached America during the early 19thcentury. Like the Europeans, the American Romantics demonstrated a high level of moral enthusiasm, commitment to individualism and the unfolding of the self, an emphasis on intuitive perception, and the assumption that the natural world was inherently good while human society was filled with corruption.
Romanticism became popular in American politics, philosophy and art. The movement appealed to the revolutionary spirit of America as well as to those longing to break free of the strict religious traditions of the earlysettlementperiod. The Romantics rejectedrationalismand religious intellect. It appealed especially to opponents of Calvinism, a Protestant sect that believes that the destiny of each individual is preordained by God.
American Romanticism was an off-shoot of this broader intellectual or literary outlook. It was a very optimistic attitude that emphasized feeling and emotion and sentiment as opposed to reason. It was a reaction to the Age of Enlightenment that had gone before. The universe was not a static mechanism as people during the Age of Enlightenment thought, but rather an organic entity that was constantly changing. Change was a fact of life. It was based on the idea of progress and betterment. Perfection was one of the words that represented a common romantic notion.
America's preoccupation with freedom became a great source of motivation for Romantic writers as many were delighted in free expression and emotion without so fear of ridicule and controversy. They also put more effort into the psychological development of their characters, and the main characters typically displayed extremes of sensitivity and excitement. The works of the Romantic Era also differed from preceding works in that they spoke to a wider audience, partly reflecting the greater distribution of books as costs came down and literacy rose during the period. The Romantic period saw an increase in female authors and readers.
Transcendentalismin America
Transcendentalismwas America's first notable intellectual and philosophical movement. It developed in the 1830s and 1840s in theNew Englandregion of the United States as a protest to the general state of culture and society. In particular, transcendentalists criticized the state of intellectualism at Harvard University and the doctrine of the Unitarian church taught at Harvard Divinity School.
Among the transcendentalists' core beliefs was the inherent goodness of both man and nature. Transcendentalists believed that society and its institutions - particularly organized religion and political parties - ultimately corrupted the purity of the individual. They had faith that man is at his best when truly "self-reliant" and independent. It is only from such real individuals that true community could be formed.
The publication of Ralph Waldo Emerson's 1836 essay Natureis usually considered the watershed moment at which transcendentalism became a major cultural movement. Emerson wrote in his speech The American Scholar: "We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; Divine Soul which also inspires all men." Emerson closed the essay by calling for a revolution in human consciousness to emerge from the brand new idealist philosophy.
The transcendentalists desired to ground their religion and philosophy in transcendental principles. According to them, these are principles not based on, or falsifiable by, physical experience, but deriving from the inner spiritual or mental essence of the human. In contrast, they were intimately familiar with the English Romantics, and the transcendental movement may be partially described as an American outgrowth ofRomanticism.
Emerson and Thoreau – Leaders of Transcendentalism
OVERVIEW
Ralph Waldo Emerson(May 25, 1803 – April 27, 1882) and Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817 – May 6, 1862) were two important American writers and leaders of the Transcendentalist movement.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON'S INFLUENCE
Ralph Waldo Emerson was an American essayist, lecturer, and poet. He was seen as a champion of individualism and a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society. He disseminated his thoughts through dozens of published essays and more than 1,500 public lectures across the United States. Emerson gradually moved away from the religious and social beliefs of his contemporaries, formulating and expressing the philosophy ofTranscendentalismin his 1836 essayNature. Following this ground-breaking work, he gave a speech entitled "The American Scholar" in 1837.
Emerson wrote on a number of subjects, never espousing fixed philosophical tenets, but developing certain ideas and themes .such as individuality, freedom, the ability for humankind to realize almost anything, and the relationship between the soul and the surrounding world. While his writing style can be seen as somewhat impenetrable, and was thought so even in his own time, Emerson's essays remain among the linchpins of American thinking, and Emerson's work has greatly influenced the thinkers, writers and poets that have followed him. When asked to sum up his work, he said his central doctrine was "the infinitude of the private man."
HENRY DAVID THOREAU'S INFLUENCE
Henry David Thoreau was an American author, poet, philosopher, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, and leading transcendentalist. He is best known for his bookWalden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essayCivil Disobedience, an argument for individual resistance to civil government in moral opposition to an unjust state.
Thoreau's literary style interweaves close natural observation, personal experience, pointed rhetoric, symbolic meanings, and historical lore. He was also deeply interested in the idea of survival in the face of hostile elements, historical change, and natural decay. At the same time, he advocated abandoning waste and illusion in order to discover life's true essential needs.
He was a lifelong abolitionist, delivering lectures that attacked the FugitiveSlave Lawwhile praising the writings of Wendell Phillips and defending abolitionist John Brown. Thoreau's philosophy of civil disobedience later influenced the political thoughts and actions of such notable figures as Leo Tolstoy, Mohandas Gandhi, andMartin Luther King, Jr.
The American Renaissance
During the mid-nineteenth century, many American literary masterpieces were produced. Sometimes called the American Renaissance (a term coined by the scholar F. O. Matthiessen), this period covers approximately 1830 to the dawn of the Civil War, and it has often been closely identified withAmerican Romanticism and Transcendentalism.
The American Renaissance is characterized by renewed national self-confidence and a feeling that the United States was the heir to Greek Democracy, Roman Law, and Renaissance Humanism. The American preoccupation with national identity (or nationalism) in this period was expressed bymodernism, technology, and academic classicism. Americans felt that their civilization was coming of age.
Major works in Literature
Major works from those years include Ralph Waldo Emerson'sRepresentative Men(1850), though most of Emerson's best-known texts were published earlier); Nathaniel Hawthorne'sThe Scarlet Letter(1850) andThe House of the Seven Gables(1851); Herman Melville'sMoby-Dick(1851), Henry David Thoreau'sWalden(1854); and Walt Whitman's first edition ofLeaves of Grass(1855) .
Some have criticized the excessive focus on white male authors. In response to this criticism, authors such as Emily Dickinson (who began writing poetry in the 1830s) and Harriet Beecher Stowe (author ofUncle Tom's Cabin) are often considered part of this age of literature.
The Hudson River School Artists
The first coherent school of American art, the Hudson River painters, helped to shape the mythos of the American landscape. Beginning with the works of Thomas Cole (1801-1848) and Asher B. Durand (1796-1886) and evolving into the Luminist and late Romantic schools, landscape painting was the prevalent genre of 19th century American art.
With roots in European Romanticism and with correspondences to European painters such as the Nazarenes and Caspar David Friedrich in Germany or John Constable and Joseph Turner in England, the Hudson River painters, nonetheless, set about to heed Emerson's call "to ignore the courtly Muses of Europe" and define a distinct vision for American art. The artists who came to maturity in the years of egalitarian Jacksonian democracy and expansion translated these ideals into an aesthetic that was sweeping and spontaneous.
Like the vast nation that lay before them, which they celebrated not chauvinistically but with a sense of awe for its majestic natural resources and a feeling of optimism for the huge potential it held, the Hudson River painters depicted a New World wilderness in which man, minuscule as he was beside the vastness of creation, nevertheless retained that divine spark that completed the circle of harmony.
As Thomas Cole maintained, if nature were untouched by the hand of man--as was much of the primeval American landscape in the early 19th century--then man could become more easily acquainted with the hand of God. Sharing the philosophy of the American Transcendentalists, the Hudson River painters created visual embodiments of the ideals about whichEmerson,Thoreau, William Cullen Bryant, andWhitmanwrote. Concurring with Emerson, who had written in his 1841 essay, THOUGHTS ON ART, that painting should become a vehicle through which the universal mind could reach the mind of mankind, the Hudson River painters believed art to be an agent of moral and spiritual transformation.