1. American Romanticism
English 10
Mr. McNealey

2. Definition
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

3. Romantic Authors William Cullen Bryant Washington Irving
Oliver Wendall Holmes
Edgar Allen Poe
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Emily Dickinson
Henry David Thoreau
Herman Melville
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Walt Whitman
John Greenleaf Whittier

4. Characteristics
To Romantic writers, the city was often a place of moral ambiguity and worse, of corruption and death.
Romantic writers associated the countryside with independence, moral clarity, and healthful living.
Romantic writers believed that imagination was able to apprehend truths that the rational mind could not apprehend.

5. More Characteristics Values feeling and intuition over reason
Places faith in inner experience and the power of imagination
Prefers youthful innocence to educated sophistication.
Champions individual freedom and the worth of the individual
Sees poetry as the highest expression of the imagination.

6. The Fireside Poets Henry Wadsworth Longfellow John Greenleaf Whittier
Oliver Wendell Holmes
James Russel Lowell