American Romanticism - Characteristics
American Romanticism - Characteristics
• 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 nature's 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
• Sees poetry as the highest expression of the imagination
• Finds inspiration in myth, legend, and folk culture
American Romantic Hero - Characteristics
• Is young, or possesses youthful qualities
• Is innocent and pure of purpose
• Has a sense of honor based not on society's rules but on some higher principle
• Has a knowledge of people and of life based on deep, intuitive understanding, not on formal learning
• Loves nature and avoids town life
• Quests for some higher truth in the natural world
Dark Romantics
• Poe, Melville, Hawthorne, etc…
• Tone of dark romantics is, well, dark
• Looked inward to the dark side of human nature – greed, anger, hypocrisy, sinfulness, guilt, fear, cowardice
• Experiences common to our human experience are depicted showing how reactions based on the negative characteristics of personality can hurt others, cause tragedy
• Warning – themes demonstrated what happens when we allow our natural selfishness to surface and dictate our actions
Transcendentalists
• Emerson and Thoreau and other authors
• Called for “American intellectual independence from Europe”
• New England Renaissance 1840-1855
• Term “transcendentalism” from German philosopher, Immanuel Kant
• Kant – transcendental “the understanding a person gains intuitively because it lies beyond direct experience.”
• Other ideas that affected Transcendentalist thought: Plato (Greek); Pascal (French – math); Swedenborg (Swedish - mystic/scientist) and anti-materialist Buddhist thought.
• Believed that real truths lie “outside the experience of the senses” in an “Over-Soul”
• Hard to explain, but recognize it when you see it!
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