Notes on Romanticism

Some Romantic Authors:

William Cullen Bryant, James Fenimore Cooper, Emily Dickinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Washington Irving, Thomas Jefferson, James Russell Lowell, Herman Melville, Thomas Paine, Edgar Allan Poe, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry David Thoreau, Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, John Greenleaf Whittier

Romantics Emphasized:

• Imagination and boundlessness, not reason and restriction
• The vision of a greater personal freedom for the individual
• Individualism; buoyancy; optimism of the frontier
• The heroism of early Americans
• Addition of strangeness to beauty; aspiration; wonder; mystery
• Predominance of imagination over reason and formal rules and over the sense of fact or the actual

Romantics Were Known For:

• Revolutionary activities for political freedom & individual rights
• Humanitarian reform (abolitionism & feminism)
• Liberal religious movements
• Labor reform
• Economic experiments in communal living
• Transcendentalism--a romantic, idealistic, mystical, and individualistic belief which identified, through nature, the unity and man and God
• [Possibly] psychological desire to escape from unpleasant realities

Romantic Characteristics in American Literature:

• Sentimentalism
• Primitivism and the noble savage
• Political liberalism
• Celebration of natural beauty and the simple life
• Introspection
• Idealization of the common man, uncorrupted by civilization
• Interest in the picturesque past
• Interest in remote places (e.g. the frontier)
• Individualism
• Technical innovation (e.g. Whitman's prosody--"freedom" of blank verse)
• Humanitarianism
• Morbid melancholy
• Native legendry
• Historical romance; sympathetic interest in the past
• Mysticism

Sources: Notes taken from Hart’s The Oxford Companion to American Literature and Holman and Harmon’s A Handbook to Literature