American Romanticism, Essay Example

American Romanticism (or “American Renaissance”) relates to several decades before the Civil War (about 1830-1840 to 1865). American Romantic tradition shared many characteristics with European art, due to its close connection with British Romanticism, namely British poetry (Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Keats, Shelley).

The grounding principles of European Romanticism opposed to the doctrine of reason dominating the preceding Age of Enlightenment and rigors of Classicism. Romantic art focuses on personality and its opposition to society. McFarland Pennell (2006) concludes that “Romantics emphasized self-cultivation, a continual process of inner development, which allowed and individual to reach…potential and … recognize the divinity within” (p.2).

Disappointment in civilization, social and scientific progress, spiritual devastation leads to reappraisal of values. Predicted by the enlighteners new society did not prove the expected results. Therefore, future turned to be independent of the reason. It explicates the pessimism, desperation, hopelessness inherent in many romantic works. On the other hand, the hero challenges this world on his way to the ideal, to the absolute. The spirit of the romantic hero is a complex person full of contradictions. The specific American components of the romanticism of American writers included particular awareness of wild nature, which manifested the urge of exploration of new territories in westward expansion.

The distinctive trait of American Romanticism is the flourishing of literature. The constellation of prominent writers (Bryant, Irving, Cooper, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Whittier, Whitman, Longfellow, Lowell and Dickinson) emerges in this period. Their works represent various themes (moral qualities, slave abolition, pursuits of romantic absolute) and forms (novels, short stories, free verse poetry). The writers consider theoretical background of their creations.

The Romantic period in American literature marks a turning point for the development of national self-consciousness. Besides the overall excitement over human possibilities, the literary outburst enabled the consideration of American literature separately of “paternal” British tradition. They created artworks which possessed distinctive American character. The artist expressed their response to keen interest of European Romanticists to folklore, to national background enclosed in myths and legends.

Romantic writers supposed poetry the embodiment of bountiful imagination. Meditation of the natural world comes into poetry as one of major themes. Unlike American Romantic prose, aimed at diversion from European writing, poetry experienced gradual transformations. The Fireside poets Longfellow, Whittier, Holmes, and Lowell applied traditional techniques of English metre and themes, involving national settings and subjects. The publication of Leaves of Grass by W. Whitman revealed the romantic aspiration for escape from the formalistic requirements chaining poetry. His free verse based on cadence spoke the nation through thought-provoking precise language.

The novelists of the period praised supernatural phenomena, imagination world. The themes of the past, of exotic gave vent to the genre of Gothic novel. The disappointment in progress consequences and helplessness of reason gave way to the conflicts of good and evil, of psychological subjects, like guilt, madness. The stories of E. A. Poe often deal with these mysterious themes. His sensitive, lonely, and often mentally sick protagonist seeks Ideal.

James Fenimore Coopers was one of the first writers to describe American settings in his novels. Besides, nature’s beauty was perceived as a way of spiritual development, unlike artificial civilization depriving the individual of untouched nature. Therefore, the artists do not rely on the progress any more.

American Romanticism is also associated with the philosophical, literary movement of “transcendentalism”. The founders and followers of “transcendentalism” expressed their views in philosophical essays. R. W. Emerson, H. D. Thoreau, and M. Fuller sought spiritual values within individual. They considered the natural world a sign for inner spirit. They revolted against the government and its institutions which attempted to assume control over the individual. Though Ralf Waldo Emerson considered himself a poet, he is known first as prolific thinker on various philosophical, social themes. In 1836, Emerson’s essays in nature studies were published in Nature. The book explicated the foundations of Transcendentalist philosophy, which justified the connection of nonhuman nature world (Not-Me) and spiritual human world (Me).

Unlike totally investigated American Romantic literature, Romantic Paintings have not been exhaustively studied. The first American school of landscape painting was Hudson River School (1835 -1870). They portrayed sights of Hudson River Valley. The first leader of the group was Thomas Cole. According to Miller and Soby (1969), Cole “brought to landscape decided imaginative power”, “passionate moral force which made him the acknowledged leader and prophet of nature Romanticism”  (p.16). Other famous representatives of the school are George Caleb Bingham, Frederic Edwin Church, Asher B. Durand, John Frederic Kensett, Thomas Moran, Albert Bierstadt, George Inness, and Martin Johnson Heade. They valued the neoclassical principles of proportion, decorum and order. The canvases are grotesque, picturesque with some tendency to strangeness. Romantic figure painters, as John Quidor inspired by literary works, was unknown to his contemporaries.

The Civil War marked the end of the pioneer era in American painting; “artists continued to draw inspiration from local scene, in both landscape and figure painting, but they no longer received so strong a metaphysical impetus from the newness, wildness and size of their county as had the earlier Romantics” (Miller & Soby, 1969, p.25).

References

McFarland Pennel, M. (2006). Masterpieces of American Romantic Literature. Wesport ,CT: Greenwood Press. Print.

Miller D. C., & Soby T. J. (1969). Romantic Paintings in America. New York: Arno Press. Print.