| Basic Concepts: American Literary Romanticism
c Definition The term "Romanticism" refers to a set of principles that belong to a period of cultural history often marked by experimentation, shifting values, and radical new social roles. University of South Carolina cultural historian Morris Peckham assigns the advent of Western Romanticism to a few years before the nineteenth century when a group of intellectuals across Europe began to think of themselves, the human community, and the "nature of nature" down an entirely different course, a period when first the academics and philosophers, then the artists began to doubt some of the key principles of the Neo-classical world view. Dr. Peckham calls the phenomenon "right angle" visioning, stepping outside one's own frame of reference to reflect on the self, its assumptions, and conclusions. This bold thinking resulted in a cultural revolution known as the Romantic Period. . Romanticism and the Cycle of Social History Another way of approaching the subject of "romanticism" is to think in terms of the cycle of social evolution and devolution. According to twentieth-century historian Arnold Toynbee, societies and civilizations advance through specific stages: a "formative" stage, a "pre-classic" stage, the "classic" stage, and a "post-classic" stage. Each period leading up to the "classic" stage is characterized by creative innovation. The "classic" stage is a period marked by stability, fixed forms, and order. The "classic" period is a time of comfort and reassurance when the society's sense of itself is generally established. The post-classic stage is a period of disaffection, irritation, and boredom, giving rise to the idealism of the past and a lament for its passing. When the past becomes irreconcilable to a society's demands for it, revolt is not far away. Out of the often terrifying consequences of social revolution, the romantic period--with its veritable explosion of new insight and creativity--is born like the phoenix out of the ashes of the past. . The Romantic Interpretation of Nature The literature of the American Romantic Period reflects such a resurrection and new flowering. It was prompted, in part, by a new attitude about the American landscape. Beginning with the New York Hudson River Valley "School" of painters, artists shifted from painting people to painting the vast frontier and its far-ranging wilderness. Seen from the proper perspective, the landscape was breathtaking and inspirational. In short order, it became the seat of the spiritual and sublime, the nexus point for the soul and its creator. Literature followed the lead of the artists. Both poetry and prose examined the relationship between form, order, and meaning in human experience in the context of the pristine natural world. . The Romantic "Agenda" Romantic American literature operates from a whole new agenda of themes and principles. The Romantics revisited conventional Christian spirituality, seeking new contexts in Eastern mysticism. Socially and politically, Transcendentalism shifted authority from the domain of the state and social law to the faculty of the intuition and moral sense, proselytizing an ethic of individual responsibility and the celebration of the rarefied individual soul over impersonal and dehumanizing society. Psychologically, poets and their philosophers slipped out of the mannacles of rigid empiricism and embraced the free spirits of the imagination, creativity, and the emotional life, daring to explore not merely the probable in human experience but the possible and its Gothic implications. . The Principles: Organicism, Dynamism, and Diversitarianism Lying behind this remarkable revolution in thought and creativity is a fundamental re-examination of the most basic assumptions about the nature of the universe and the implications of such a re-examination for the nature and place of the human race in that universe. Peckham identifies three themes which mark the clear lines of departure of Romanticism: "organicism," "dynamism," and "diversitarianism" (Triumph of Romanticism, 1970). "Organicism" is Peckham's term for the Romantic's sense that the universe is alive, not the mechanical contrivance of the Neo-classical projection, and, as alive, is in constant flux and change. "Dynamism" references the source of that life and assigns it to the universe itself; that is, the universe is its own "dynamo" or generator. "Diversitarianism" is Peckham's corollary to the assumptions of "organicism" and "dynamism": if the universe is alive, then all that it is is unique and uniquely evolving. . The Romantics would not categorically reject the Neo-classicist's quintessential principle: that the universe is governed by fixed and immutable natural law. Rather, the Romantics countered, in such a universe, what is important is the effect of those natural laws and that effect is constant change. . Severe Implications In a universe that is alive and constantly changing, even "truth" itself is elusive, perhaps . . . perhaps even "relative." And if that's the case, then it's a short step from the reassessment of the place of humanity in the physical universe to the reassessment of every arena of human relationships, beginning, perhaps with ethics and religion. . Online Connections See the Gainsville College site for American Literary Romanticism: Online Resources. See also Ann Woodlief's Introduction: The American Romanticism and Web Goodies On American Romanticism. For excellent, succinct discussions of authors and themes, see lectures on American Romanticism (University of Illinois at Urbana). See also this interesting PowerPoint program by Dave Medicus. . Our Course Connections The writers of the American Romantic Movement constitute the culmination of our studies in English 2327. Major Romantic writers in our study include William Cullen Bryant, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, and Henry David Thoreau. .  |