American Romanticism

1
American Romanticism

• America had won its independence but
• culture was commonly seen by Am. Romantics as
• materialist
• makeshift
• conformist
• dogged by religious moral orthodoxy dogma and
  didacticism
• often advocated a more radical self-reliance
• secularization ambivalence

2
American Romantic Poetry Sampler

• Key poems for Romantic elements
• Thanatopsis
• Each and All
• Psalm of Life
• Sonnet--To Science
• Spontaneous Me
• I never lost as much/ I heard a fly buzz/ I died
  for beauty

• W.C. Bryant (1794-1878)
• R.W. Emerson (1803-82)
• H.W. Longfellow (1807-1882)
• E.A. Poe (1809-1849)
• W.Whitman (1819-1892)
• E. Dickinson (1830-1886)

3
Religious orientations

• (New England, NYC) Calvinist
• NE Unitarian Transcendentalist
• NE Unitarian
• Episcopal?
• Quaker
• Calvinist

• W.C. Bryant (1794-1878)
• R.W. Emerson (1803-82)
• H.W. Longfellow (1807-1882)
• E.A. Poe (1809-1849)
• W.Whitman (1819-1892)
• E. Dickinson (1830-1886)

4
Religious uses of Romanticism

• The American writers position marginalized and
  pedestalized
• useless and necessary
• marginal but not bohemian
• individual but communal consensus
• both male and female authorship

• Coleridge allowed for a theory of language that
  allowed for theological discourse as a metaphor
• led to a kind of theological erosion