1. The Romantic Period in American Literature

2. Hudson River School of Art
Hudson River School paintings reflect three themes of America in the 19th century: discovery, exploration, and settlement. The paintings also depict the American landscape as a pastoral setting, where human beings and nature coexist peacefully

3. In the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson
“For all men live by truth, and stand in need of expression. In love, in art, in avarice, in politics, in labor, in games, we study to utter our painful secret. The man is only half himself, the other half is his expression.”

4. After the Bill of Rights and Before the Civil War

5. City vs. Country To the Romantic, the city is corrupt and ugly.
To the Romantic, the country represents independence, moral clarity, and healthy living.

6. Imagination over Reason
Romanticism is a reaction against rationalism which brought about the sooty, squalid cities of the Industrial Revolution.
Imagination was able to apprehend truth the rational mind could not reach.

7. Romantics vs. Rationalists
Imagination
Spontaneity
Individual feelings
Wild nature
Reason
Logic
Planning
Cultivation

8. Gothic Novels
Allowed Romantics to explore the exotic nature of the supernatural realm and the psychological exploration of the human mind.

9. The American Journey
Takes reader to the literal countryside and the countryside of the imagination.
A journey away from corruption of civilization and rational thought.
A journey toward the integrity of nature and the freedom of the imagination.

10. Romantic Novels Looked to wilderness and westward expansion.
“Geography of the Imagination”

11. Romantic Poets
Believed poetry was the greatest witness to the power of imagination.
Still modeled themselves after the European poets.
Fireside poets known for their comfortable subjects appealing to families—love, patriotism, nature, family, God and religion.
Their literary conservationism kept them from being truly innovative.

12. Romantic Hero 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
Avoids town life

13. 5 I’s of Romanticism Imagination Intuition Innocence Inner Experience
Inspiration from nature and the supernatural

14. When I heard the Learn’d Astronomer
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.
(Walt Whitman)