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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