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!