On American Romanticism 
Definitions
from A Handbook to Literature, Sixth Edition
C. Hugh Holman and William Harmon.
Romanticism:
a movement of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that marked
the reaction in literature, philosophy, art, religion, and politics
from the neoclassicism and formal orthodoxy of the preceding period.
Romanticism arose so gradually and exhibited so many phases that a
satisfactory definition is not possible. The aspect most stressed
in France is reflected in Victor Hugo's phrase "liberalism in literature,"
meaning especially the freeing of the artist and writer from restrains
and rules and suggesting that phase of individualism marked by the
encouragement of revolutionary political ideas. The poet Heine noted
the chief aspect of German romanticism in calling it the revival of
medievalism in art, letters, and life. Walter Pater thought the addition
of strangement to beauty (the neoclassicists having insisted on order
in beauty) constituted the romantic temper. An interesting schematic
explanation calls romanticism the predominance of imagination over
reason and formal rules (classicism) and over the sense of fact or
the actual (realism), a formula that recalls Hazlitt's statement (1816)
that the class beauty of a Greek temple resided chiefly in its actual
form and its obvious connotations, whereas the "romantic" beauty of
a Gothic building or ruin arose from associated ideas that the imagination
was stimulated to conjure up. The term is used in many senses, a recent
favorite being that which sees in the romantic mood a psychological
desire to escape from unpleasant realities.
Perhaps more
useful to the student than definitions will be a list of romantic
characteristics, though romanticism was not a clearly conceived
system. Among the aspects of the romantic movement in England may
be listed: sensibility; primitivism; love of nature; sympathetic
interest in the past, especially the medieval; mysticism; individualism;
romanticism criticism; and a reaction against whatever characterized
neoclassicism. Among the specific characteristics embraced by these
general attitudes are: the abandonment of the heroic couplet in
favor of blank verse, the sonnet, the Spenserian stanza, and many
experimental verse forms; the dropping of the conventional poetic
diction in favor of fresher language and bolder figures; the idealization
of rural life (Goldsmith); enthusiasm for the wild, irregular, or
grotesque in nature and art; unrestrained imagination; enthusiasm
for the uncivilized or "natural"; interest in human rights (Burns,
Byron); sympathy with animal life (Cowper); sentimental melancholy
(Gray); emotional psychology in fiction (Richardson); collection
and imitation of popular ballads (Percy, Scott); interest in ancient
Celtic and Scandinavian mythology and literature ; renewed interest
in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton. Typical literary forms include
the lyric, especially the love lyric, the reflective lyric, the
nature lyric, and the lyric of morbid melancholy...;the sentimental
novel; the metrical romance; the sentimental comedy; the ballad;
the problem novel; the historical novel; the Gothic romance; the
sonnet; and the critical essay....
The term designates
a literary and philosophical theory that tends to see the individual
at the center of all life, and it places the individual, therefore,
at the center of art, making literature valuable as an expression
of unique feelings and particular attitudes (the expressive theory
of criticism) and valuing its fidelity in portraying experiences,
however fragmentary and incomplete, more than it values adherence
to completeness, unity, or the demands of genre. Although romanticism
tends at times to regard nature as alien, it more often sees in
nature a revelation of Truth, the "living garment of God," and a
more suitable subject for art than those aspects of the world sullied
by artifice. Romanticism seeks to find the Absolute, the Ideal,
by transcending the actual, whereas realism finds its values in
the actual and naturalism in the scientific laws the undergird the
actual.
Romantic
Period in American Literature, 1830-1865.
The period between
the "second revolution" of the Jacksonian Era and the close of the
Civil War in America saw the testings of a nation and its development
by ordeal. It was an age of great westward expansion, of the increasing
gravity of the slavery question, of an intensification of the spirit
of embattled sectionalism in the South, and of a powerful impulse
to reform in the North. Its culminating act was the trial by arms
of the opposing views in a civil war, whose conclusion certified the
fact of a united nation dedicated to the concepts of industry and
capitalism and philosophically committed to egalitarianism. In a sense
it may be said that the three decades following the inauguration of
President Andrew Jackson in 1829 put to the test his views of democracy
and saw emerge from the test a secure union committed to essentially
Jacksonian principles.
In literature
it was America's first great creative period, a full flowering of
the romantic impulse on American soil. Surviving form the Federalist
Age were its three major literary figures: Bryant, Irving, and Cooper.
Emerging as new writers of strength and creative power were the
novelists Hawthorne, Simms, Melville, and Harriet Beecher Stowe;
the poets Poe, Whittier, Holmes, Longfellow, Lowell, Dickinson,
and Whitman; the essayists Thoreau, Emerson, and Holmes; the critics
Poe, Lowell, and Simms....
The poetry was
predominantly romantic in spirit and form. Moral qualities were
significantly present in the verse of Emerson, Bryant, Longfellow,
Whittier, Holmes, Lowell, and Thoreau. The sectional issues were
debated in poetry by Whittier and Lowell speaking for abolition,
and Timrod, Hayne, and Simms speaking for the South. Poe formulated
his theories of poetry and in some fifty lyrics practiced a symbolist
verse that was to be, despite the change of triviality by such contemporaries
as Emerson, the strongest single poetic influence emerging from
pre-Civil War America, particularly in its impact on European poetry....Whitman,
beginning with the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, was the ultimate
expression of a poetry organic in form and romantic in spirit, united
to a concept of democracy that was pervasively egalitarian.
In essays and
in lectures the New England transcendentalists-- Emerson, Thoreau,
Margaret Fuller, and Alcott--carried the expression of philosophic
and religious ideas to a high level....In the 1850s emerged the
powerful symbolic novels of Hawthorne and Melville and the effective
propaganda novel of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Poe, Hawthorne, and Simms
practiced the writing of short stories through the period, taking
up where Irving had left off in the development of the form,,,,
At the end of
the Civil War a new nation had been born, and it was to demand and
receive a new literature less idealistic and more practical, less
exalted and more earthy, less consciously artistic and more honest
than that produced in the age when the American dream had glowed
with greatest intensity and American writers had made a great literary
period by capturing on their pages the enthusiasm and the optimism
of that dream.
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