American
Romanticism 1810 -1865
Transcendentalism
We can fairly safely refer to American Romanticism as being
synonymous with Transcendentalism, a philosophical, religious and literary
movement associated with familiar Americans: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David
Thoreau, and Walt Whitman.
For the most part
Transcendentalism is a clone or more
radical version of its European 19th century original, focusing on:
-- Emotion over Intellect
-- Truth through Beauty, Insight vs. Reason
-- Spiritualism over Reason
-- Divinity of Nature
-- Humanism and Idealization of the Common Man/Peasant
American Transcendentalists differ from their European counterparts
in their belief and emphasis on the unity of being and American radical
individualism.
Radical
Individualism
Mainly separately from these Transcendentalist ideals, Emerson also
set out to create a literary tradition representing uniquely American bad-assedness:
our Self
Reliant American individualism :"We will walk on our own
feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds...A nation of
men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the
Divine Soul which also inspires all men." -- Emerson
Emerson gives us an American and hands-on vitality as
opposed to the more effeminate European sensibility: he moves us from
Wordsworth’s pastoral fields to American
wilderness, and this in turn shifted us from shepherds to the American
frontier: cowboys, Indians, and men like Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone etc.
This is further blended with American optimism (as opposed
to Puritan Christian determinism/pre-destination) and egalitarianism (as
opposed to European classism): the belief that each and all men (because we are
all “created equal”) were capable of creating his own destiny.
This belief in American equality also fed directly into their
support for the abolition of slavery, in many ways mirroring and further
developing earlier Enlightenment themes.
Keats’ Negative
Capability and Romantic Anti-Rationalism:
"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by
little statesmen and philosophers and divines."
Ralph
Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
Walt
Whitman, "Song
of Myself"
Unity of Being
Transcendentalists argued that all beings, that God and his
creations – the universe, the world, humanity, are one and the same thing.
Thus the soul of each individual was a microcosm of the world itself.
We see this most clearly in the opening lines of Whitman’s “Song Of
Myself”.
In some ways this is a logical outgrowth of Rousseau’s theory of
the Noble Savage: God made all things, including the earth and man, either in
his benevolence or in his own image, and thus all things are a part of God;
thus, we are all “one”. (If you’ve studied Eastern religions like Buddhism I
believe you can see their influence here, as well.)
Whitman
Whitman’s Poetry Embodies
All of These Ideals:
-- His “Walt” character
represents one man as all Americans embracing the American Experience of hard
work, self reliance and contact with natural world.
-- He writes with unbridled, uncritical American, Romantic optimism
-- To Experience Nature is more than to understand it; he
simply wants to be present in its sublime truth.
-- He celebrate the self as a celebration of all creation:
all things are unified.
-- Free verse and common language:
-- As
representations of American freedom and independence
-- As
representations of spontaneous feeling over form
-- As a
celebration of the common: common man, common language
-- As an attempt to make a new poetry that would appeal to all Americans instead
of traditional “aristocracy” or intelligentsia
Whitman, Song
of Myself (1900)