Chapter Three
The Romantic Period, 1820-1860: Essayists and Poets
Romantic ideas centered around art as inspiration, the spiritual and aesthetic dimension of nature, and metaphors of organic growth. Art, rather than science, Romantics argued, could best express universal truth. The Romantics underscored the importance of expressive art for the individual and society. In his essay "The Poet" (1844), Ralph Waldo Emerson, perhaps the most influential writer of the Romantic era, asserts:
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.
The development of the self became a major theme; self- awareness a primary method. If, according to Romantic theory, self and nature were one, self-awareness was not a selfish dead end but a mode of knowledge opening up the universe. If one's self were one with all humanity, then the individual had a moral duty to reform social inequalities and relieve human suffering. The idea of "self" -- which suggested selfishness to earlier generations -- was redefined. New compound words with positive meanings emerged: "self-realization," "self-expression," "self- reliance."
As the unique, subjective self became important, so did the realm of psychology. Exceptional artistic effects and techniques were developed to evoke heightened psychological states. The "sublime" -- an effect of beauty in grandeur (for example, a view from a mountaintop) -- produced feelings of awe, reverence, vastness, and a power beyond human comprehension.
Romanticism was affirmative and appropriate for most American poets and creative essayists. America's vast mountains, deserts, and tropics embodied the sublime. The Romantic spirit seemed particularly suited to American democracy: It stressed individualism, affirmed the value of the common person, and looked to the inspired imagination for its aesthetic and ethical values. Certainly the New England Transcendentalists -- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and their associates -- were inspired to a new optimistic affirmation by the Romantic movement. In New England, Romanticism fell upon fertile soil.
TRANSCENDENTALISM
The Transcendentalist movement
was
a
reaction
against 18th
century rationalism and a manifestation of the general
humanitarian trend of 19th century thought. The movement was
based on a fundamental belief in the unity of the world and God.
The soul of each individual was thought to be identical with the
world -- a microcosm of the world itself. The doctrine of self-
reliance and individualism developed through the belief in the
identification of the individual soul with God.
Transcendentalism was intimately connected with Concord, a
small New England village 32 kilometers west of Boston. Concord
was the first inland settlement of the original Massachusetts Bay
Colony. Surrounded by forest, it was and remains a peaceful town
close enough to Boston's lectures, bookstores, and colleges to be
intensely cultivated, but far enough away to be serene. Concord
was the site of the first battle of the American Revolution, and
Ralph Waldo Emerson's poem commemorating the battle, "Concord
Hymn," has one of the most famous opening stanzas in American
literature:
Concord was the first rural artist's colony, and the first
place to offer a spiritual and cultural alternative to American
materialism. It was a place of high-minded conversation and
simple living (Emerson and Henry David Thoreau both had vegetable
gardens). Emerson, who moved to Concord in 1834, and Thoreau are
most closely associated with the town, but the locale also
attracted the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, the feminist writer
Margaret Fuller, the educator (and father of novelist Louisa May
Alcott) Bronson Alcott, and the poet William Ellery Channing. The
Transcendental Club was loosely organized in 1836 and included,
at various times, Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, Channing, Bronson
Alcott, Orestes Brownson (a leading minister), Theodore Parker
(abolitionist and minister), and others.
The Transcendentalists published a quarterly magazine, The
Dial, which lasted four years and was first edited by
Margaret
Fuller and later by Emerson. Reform efforts engaged them as well
as literature. A number of Transcendentalists were abolitionists,
and some were involved in experimental utopian communities such
as nearby Brook Farm (described in Hawthorne's The Blithedale
Romance) and Fruitlands.
Unlike many European groups, the Transcendentalists never
issued a manifesto. They insisted on individual differences -- on
the unique viewpoint of the individual. American Transcendental
Romantics pushed radical individualism to the extreme. American
writers often saw themselves as lonely explorers outside society
and convention. The American hero -- like Herman Melville's
Captain Ahab, or Mark Twain's Huck Finn, or Edgar Allan Poe's
Arthur Gordon Pym -- typically faced risk, or even certain
destruction, in the pursuit of metaphysical self-discovery. For
the Romantic American writer, nothing was a given. Literary and
social conventions, far from being helpful, were dangerous.
There was tremendous pressure to discover an authentic literary
form, content, and voice -- all at the same time. It is clear
from the many masterpieces produced in the three decades before
the U.S. Civil War (1861-65) that American writers rose to the
challenge.
Emerson's philosophy has been called contradictory, and it
is true that he consciously avoided building a logical
intellectual system because such a rational system would have
negated his Romantic belief in intuition and flexibility. In his
essay "Self-Reliance," Emerson remarks: "A foolish consistency is
the hobgoblin of little minds." Yet he is remarkably consistent
in his call for the birth of American individualism inspired by
nature. Most of his major ideas -- the need for a new national
vision, the use of personal experience, the notion of the cosmic
Over-Soul, and the doctrine of compensation -- are suggested in
his first publication, Nature (1836). This essay opens:
Emerson loved the aphoristic genius of the 16th-century
French essayist Montaigne, and he once told Bronson Alcott that
he wanted to write a book like Montaigne's, "full of fun, poetry,
business, divinity, philosophy, anecdotes, smut." He complained
that Alcott's abstract style omitted "the light that shines on a
man's hat, in a child's spoon."
Spiritual vision and practical, aphoristic expression make
Emerson exhilarating; one of the Concord Transcendentalists aptly
compared listening to him with "going to heaven in a swing." Much
of his spiritual insight comes from his readings in Eastern
religion, especially Hinduism, Confucianism, and Islamic Sufism.
For example, his poem "Brahma" relies on Hindu sources to assert
a cosmic order beyond the limited perception of mortals:
Far or forgot to me is near
They reckon ill who leave me out;
The strong gods pine for my abode,
This poem, published in the first number of the Atlantic
Monthly magazine (1857), confused readers unfamiliar with
Brahma,
the highest Hindu god, the eternal and infinite soul of the
universe. Emerson had this advice for his readers: "Tell them to
say Jehovah instead of Brahma."
The British critic Matthew Arnold said the most important
writings in English in the 19th century had been Wordsworth's
poems and Emerson's essays. A great prose-poet, Emerson
influenced a long line of American poets, including Walt Whitman,
Emily Dickinson, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Wallace Stevens, Hart
Crane, and Robert Frost. He is also credited with influencing the
philosophies of John Dewey, George Santayana, Friedrich
Nietzsche, and William James.
Thoreau's masterpiece, Walden, or Life in the Woods
(1854),
is the result of two years, two months, and two days (from 1845
to 1847) he spent living in a cabin he built at Walden Pond on
property owned by Emerson. In Walden, Thoreau consciously
shapes
this time into one year, and the book is carefully constructed so
the seasons are subtly evoked in order. The book also is
organized so that the simplest earthly concerns come first (in
the section called "Economy," he describes the expenses of
building a cabin); by the ending, the book has progressed to
meditations on the stars.
In Walden, Thoreau, a lover of travel books and the author
of several, gives us an anti-travel book that paradoxically opens
the inner frontier of self-discovery as no American book had up
to this time. As deceptively modest as Thoreau's ascetic life, it
is no less than a guide to living the classical ideal of the good
life. Both poetry and philosophy, this long poetic essay
challenges the reader to examine his or her life and live it
authentically. The building of the cabin, described in great
detail, is a concrete metaphor for the careful building of a
soul. In his journal for January 30, 1852, Thoreau explains his
preference for living rooted in one place: "I am afraid to travel
much or to famous places, lest it might completely dissipate the
mind."
Thoreau's method of retreat and concentration resembles
Asian meditation techniques. The resemblance is not accidental:
like Emerson and Whitman, he was influenced by Hindu and Buddhist
philosophy. His most treasured possession was his library of
Asian classics, which he shared with Emerson. His eclectic style
draws on Greek and Latin classics and is crystalline, punning,
and as richly metaphorical as the English metaphysical writers of
the late Renaissance.
In Walden, Thoreau not only tests the theories of
Transcendentalism, he re-enacts the collective American
experience of the 19th century: living on the frontier. Thoreau
felt that his contribution would be to renew a sense of the
wilderness in language. His journal has an undated entry from
1851:
Walden inspired William Butler Yeats, a passionate Irish
nationalist, to write "The Lake Isle of Innisfree," while
Thoreau's essay "Civil Disobedience," with its theory of passive
resistance based on the moral necessity for the just individual
to disobey unjust laws, was an inspiration for Mahatma Gandhi's
Indian independence movement and Martin Luther King's struggle
for black Americans' civil rights in the 20th century.
Thoreau is the most attractive of the Transcendentalists
today because of his ecological consciousness, do-it-yourself
independence, ethical commitment to abolitionism, and political
theory of civil disobedience and peaceful resistance. His ideas
are still fresh, and his incisive poetic style and habit of close
observation are still modern.
A visionary book celebrating all creation, Leaves of Grass
was inspired largely by Emerson's writings, especially his essay
"The Poet," which predicted a robust, open-hearted, universal
kind of poet uncannily like Whitman himself. The poem's
innovative, unrhymed, free-verse form, open celebration of
sexuality, vibrant democratic sensibility, and extreme Romantic
assertion that the poet's self was one with the poem, the
universe, and the reader permanently altered the course of
American poetry.
Leaves of Grass is as vast, energetic, and natural as the
American continent; it was the epic generations of American
critics had been calling for, although they did not recognize it.
Movement ripples through "Song of Myself" like restless music:
The poem bulges with myriad concrete sights and sounds.
Whitman's birds are not the conventional "winged spirits" of
poetry. His "yellow-crown'd heron comes to the edge of the marsh
at night and feeds upon small crabs." Whitman seems to project
himself into everything that he sees or imagines. He is mass man,
"Voyaging to every port to dicker and adventure, / Hurrying with
the modern crowd as eager and fickle as any." But he is equally
the suffering individual, "The mother of old, condemn'd for a
witch, burnt with dry wood, her children gazing on....I am the
hounded slave, I wince at the bite of the dogs....I am the mash'd
fireman with breast-bone broken...."
More than any other writer, Whitman invented the myth of
democratic America. "The Americans of all nations at any time
upon the earth have probably the fullest poetical nature. The
United States is essentially the greatest poem." When Whitman
wrote this, he daringly turned upside down the general opinion
that America was too brash and new to be poetic. He invented a
timeless America of the free imagination, peopled with pioneering
spirits of all nations. D.H. Lawrence, the British novelist and
poet, accurately called him the poet of the "open road."
Whitman's greatness is visible in many of his poems, among
them "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," "Out of the Cradle Endlessly
Rocking," and "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," a
moving elegy on the death of Abraham Lincoln. Another important
work is his long essay "Democratic Vistas" (1871), written during
the unrestrained materialism of industrialism's "Gilded Age." In
this essay, Whitman justly criticizes America for its "mighty,
many-threaded wealth and industry" that mask an underlying "dry
and flat Sahara" of soul. He calls for a new kind of literature
to revive the American population ("Not the book needs so much to
be the complete thing, but the reader of the book does"). Yet
ultimately, Whitman's main claim to immortality lies in "Song of
Myself." Here he places the Romantic self at the center of the
consciousness of the poem:
Whitman's voice electrifies even modern readers with his
proclamation of the unity and vital force of all creation. He was
enormously innovative. From him spring the poem as autobiography,
the American Everyman as bard, the reader as creator, and the
still-contemporary discovery of "experimental," or organic, form.
In their time, the Boston
Brahmins (as the patrician, Harvard-educated class came to be
called) supplied the most respected and
genuinely cultivated literary arbiters of the United States.
Their lives fitted a pleasant pattern of wealth and leisure
directed by the strong New England work ethic and respect for
learning.
In an earlier Puritan age, the Boston Brahmins would have
been ministers; in the 19th century, they became professors,
often at Harvard. Late in life they sometimes became ambassadors
or received honorary degrees from European institutions. Most of
them travelled or were educated in Europe: They were familiar
with the ideas and books of Britain, Germany, and France, and
often Italy and Spain. Upper class in background but democratic
in sympathy, the Brahmin poets carried their genteel, European-
oriented views to every section of the United States, through
public lectures at the 3,000 lyceums (centers for public
lectures) and in the pages of two influential Boston magazines,
the North American Review and the Atlantic Monthly.
The writings of the Brahmin poets fused American and
European traditions and sought to create a continuity of shared
Atlantic experience. These scholar-poets attempted to educate and
elevate the general populace by introducing a European dimension
to American literature. Ironically, their overall effect was
conservative. By insisting on European things and forms, they
retarded the growth of a distinctive American consciousness.
Well-meaning men, their conservative backgrounds blinded them to
the daring innovativeness of Thoreau, Whitman (whom they refused
to meet socially), and Edgar Allan Poe (whom even Emerson
regarded as the "jingle man"). They were pillars of what was
called the "genteel tradition" that three generations of American
realists had to battle. Partly because of their benign but bland
influence, it was almost 100 years before the distinctive
American genius of Whitman, Melville, Thoreau, and Poe was
generally recognized in the United States.
Longfellow also wrote textbooks on modern languages and a
travel book entitled Outre-Mer, retelling foreign legends
and
patterned after Washington Irving's Sketch Book. Although
conventionality, sentimentality, and facile handling mar the long
poems, haunting short lyrics like "The Jewish Cemetery at
Newport" (1854), "My Lost Youth" (1855), and "The Tide Rises, The
Tide Falls" (1880) continue to give pleasure.
Under his wife's influence, Lowell became a liberal
reformer, abolitionist, and supporter of women's suffrage and
laws ending child labor. His Biglow Papers, First Series
(1847-
48) creates Hosea Biglow, a shrewd but uneducated village poet
who argues for reform in dialect poetry. Benjamin Franklin and
Phillip Freneau had used intelligent villagers as mouthpieces for
social commentary. Lowell writes in the same vein, linking the
colonial "character" tradition with the new realism and
regionalism based on dialect that flowered in the 1850s and came
to fruition in Mark Twain.
Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the suburb of Boston that
is home to Harvard, Holmes was the son of a prominent local
minister. His mother was a descendant of the poet Anne
Bradstreet. In his time, and more so thereafter, he symbolized
wit, intelligence, and charm not as a discoverer or a
trailblazer, but rather as an exemplary interpreter of everything
from society and language to medicine and human nature.
New England sparkled with
intellectual energy
in the years before
the Civil War. Some of the stars that shine more brightly today
than the famous constellation of Brahmins were dimmed by poverty
or accidents of gender or race in their own time. Modern readers
increasingly value the work of abolitionist John Greenleaf
Whittier and feminist and social reformer Margaret Fuller.
Whittier's sharp images, simple constructions, and ballad-
like tetrameter couplets have the simple earthy texture of Robert
Burns. His best work, the long poem "Snow Bound," vividly
recreates the poet's deceased family members and friends as he
remembers them from childhood, huddled cozily around the blazing
hearth during one of New England's blustering snowstorms. This
simple, religious, intensely personal poem, coming after the long
nightmare of the Civil War, is an elegy for the dead and a
healing hymn. It affirms the eternity of the spirit, the timeless
power of love in the memory, and the undiminished beauty of
nature, despite violent outer political storms.
The first professional woman journalist of note in America,
Fuller wrote influential book reviews and reports on social
issues such as the treatment of women prisoners and the insane.
Some of these essays were published in her book Papers on
Literature and Art (1846). A year earlier, she had her most
significant book, Woman in the Nineteenth Century. It
originally
had appeared in the Transcendentalist magazine, The Dial,
which
she edited from 1840 to 1842.
Fuller's Woman in the Nineteenth Century is the earliest
and
most American exploration of women's role in society. Often
applying democratic and Transcendental principles, Fuller
thoughtfully analyzes the numerous subtle causes and evil
consequences of sexual discrimination and suggests positive steps
to be taken. Many of her ideas are strikingly modern. She
stresses the importance of "self-dependence," which women lack
because "they are taught to learn their rule from without, not to
unfold it from within."
Fuller is finally not a feminist so much as an activist and
reformer dedicated to the cause of creative human freedom and
dignity for all:
Dickinson spent the latter part of her life as a recluse,
due to an extremely sensitive psyche and possibly to make time
for writing (for stretches of time she wrote about one poem a
day). Her day also included homemaking for her attorney father, a
prominent figure in Amherst who became a member of Congress.
Dickinson was not widely read, but knew the Bible, the works
of William Shakespeare, and works of classical mythology in great
depth. These were her true teachers, for Dickinson was certainly
the most solitary literary figure of her time. That this shy,
withdrawn, village woman, almost unpublished and unknown, created
some of the greatest American poetry of the 19th century has
fascinated the public since the 1950s, when her poetry was
rediscovered.
Dickinson's terse, frequently imagistic style is even more
modern and innovative than Whitman's. She never uses two words
when one will do, and combines concrete things with abstract
ideas in an almost proverbial, compressed style. Her best poems
have no fat; many mock current sentimentality, and some are even
heretical. She sometimes shows a terrifying existential
awareness. Like Poe, she explores the dark and hidden part of the
mind, dramatizing death and the grave. Yet she also celebrated
simple objects -- a flower, a bee. Her poetry exhibits great
intelligence and often evokes the agonizing paradox of the limits
of the human consciousness trapped in time. She had an excellent
sense of humor, and her range of subjects and treatment is
amazingly wide. Her poems are generally known by the numbers
assigned them in Thomas H. Johnson's standard edition of 1955.
They bristle with odd capitalizations and dashes.
A nonconformist, like Thoreau she often reversed meanings of
words and phrases and used paradox to great effect. From 435:
Her wit shines in the following poem (288), which ridicules
ambition and public life:
How dreary -- to be -- Somebody!
Dickinson's 1,775 poems continue to intrigue critics, who
often disagree about them. Some stress her mystical side, some
her sensitivity to nature; many note her odd, exotic appeal. One
modern critic, R.P. Blackmur, comments that Dickinson's poetry
sometimes feels as if "a cat came at us speaking English." Her
clean, clear, chiseled poems are some of the most fascinating and
challenging in American literature.
Their flag to April's breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood
And fired the shot heard round the world.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, the towering figure of his era, had a
religious sense of mission. Although many accused him of
subverting Christianity, he explained that, for him "to be a good
minister, it was necessary to leave the church." The address he
delivered in 1838 at his alma mater, the Harvard Divinity School,
made him unwelcome at Harvard for 30 years. In it, Emerson
accused the church of acting "as if God were dead" and of
emphasizing dogma while stifling the spirit.
Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the
fathers. It writes biographies, histories, criticism. The
foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we,
through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original
relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry of
insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us,
and not the history of theirs. Embosomed for a season in nature,
whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us
by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, why
should we grope among the dry bones of the past...? The sun
shines today also. There is more wool and flax in the fields.
There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own
works and laws and worship.
Or the slain think he is slain,
They know not well the subtle ways
I keep, and pass, and turn again.
Shadow and sunlight are the same;
The vanished gods to me appear;
And one to me are shame and fame.
When me they fly, I am the wings;
I am the doubter and the doubt,
And I the hymn the Brahmin sings
And pine in vain the sacred Seven,
But thou, meek lover of the good!
Find me, and turn thy back on heaven.
Henry David Thoreau, of French and Scottish descent, was born in
Concord and made it his permanent home. From a poor family, like
Emerson, he worked his way through Harvard. Throughout his life,
he reduced his needs to the simplest level and managed to live on
very little money, thus maintaining his independence. In essence,
he made living his career. A nonconformist, he attempted to live
his life at all times according to his rigorous principles. This
attempt was the subject of many of his writings.
English literature from the days of the minstrels to the Lake
Poets, Chaucer and Spenser and Shakespeare and Milton included,
breathes no quite fresh and in this sense, wild strain. It is an
essentially tame and civilized literature, reflecting Greece and
Rome. Her wilderness is a greenwood, her wildman a Robin Hood.
There is plenty of genial love of nature in her poets, but not so
much of nature herself. Her chronicles inform us when her wild
animals, but not the wildman in her, became extinct. There was
need of America.
Born on Long Island, New York, Walt Whitman was a part-time
carpenter and man of the people, whose brilliant, innovative work
expressed the country's democratic spirit. Whitman was largely
self-taught; he left school at the age of 11 to go to work,
missing the sort of traditional education that made most American
authors respectful imitators of the English. His Leaves of
Grass
(1855), which he rewrote and revised throughout his life,
contains "Song of Myself," the most stunningly original poem ever
written by an American. The enthusiastic praise that Emerson and
a few others heaped on this daring volume confirmed Whitman in
his poetic vocation, although the book was not a popular success.
I skirt sierras, my palms cover continents
I am afoot with my vision.
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
The most important Boston Brahmin poets were Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and James Russell Lowell.
Longfellow, professor of modern languages at Harvard, was the
best-known American poet of his day. He was responsible for the
misty, ahistorical, legendary sense of the past that merged
American and European traditions. He wrote three long narrative
poems popularizing native legends in European meters
"Evangeline" (1847), "The Song of Hiawatha" (1855), and "The
Courtship of Miles Standish" (1858).
James Russell Lowell, who became professor of modern languages at
Harvard after Longfellow retired, is the Matthew Arnold of
American literature. He began as a poet but gradually lost his
poetic ability, ending as a respected critic and educator. As
editor of the Atlantic and co-editor of the North
American
Review, Lowell exercised enormous influence. Lowell's A
Fable for
Critics (1848) is a funny and apt appraisal of American
writers,
as in his comment: "There comes Poe, with his raven, like Barnaby
Rudge / Three-fifths of him genius and two-fifths sheer fudge."
Oliver Wendell Holmes, a celebrated physician and professor of
anatomy and physiology at Harvard, is the hardest of the three
well-known Brahmins to categorize because his work is marked by a
refreshing versatility. It encompasses collections of humorous
essays (for example, The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table,
1858),
novels (Elsie Venner, 1861), biographies (Ralph Waldo
Emerson,
1885), and verse that could be sprightly ("The Deacon's
Masterpiece, or, The Wonderful One-Hoss Shay"), philosophical
("The Chambered Nautilus"), or fervently patriotic ("Old
Ironsides").
John Greenleaf Whittier, the most active poet of the era, had a
background very similar to Walt Whitman's. He was born and raised
on a modest Quaker farm in Massachusetts, had little formal
education, and worked as a journalist. For decades before it
became popular, he was an ardent abolitionist. Whittier is
respected for anti-slavery poems such as "Ichabod," and his
poetry is sometimes viewed as an early example of regional
realism.
Margaret Fuller, an outstanding essayist, was born and raised in
Cambridge, Massachusetts. From a modest financial background, she
was educated at home by her father (women were not allowed to
attend Harvard) and became a child prodigy in the classics and
modern literatures. Her special passion was German Romantic
literature, especially Goethe, whom she translated.
...Let us be wise and not impede the soul....Let us have one
creative energy....Let it take what form it will, and let us not
bind it by the past to man or woman, black or white.
Emily Dickinson is, in a sense, a link between her era and the
literary sensitivities of the turn of the century. A radical
individualist, she was born and spent her life in Amherst,
Massachusetts, a small Calvinist village. She never married, and
she led an unconventional life that was outwardly uneventful but
was full of inner intensity. She loved nature and found deep
inspiration in the birds, animals, plants, and changing seasons
of the New England countryside.
To a discerning Eye --
Much Sense -- the starkest Madness --
'Tis the Majority
In this, as All, prevail --
Assent -- and you are sane --
Demur -- you're straightway dangerous
And handled with a chain --
Are you -- Nobody -- Too?
Then there's a pair of us?
Don't tell! they'd advertise -- you
know!
How public -- like a Frog --
To tell one's name -- the livelong
June --
To an admiring Bog!
Outline of American Literature:
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