Hi there.
It’s Dr. Bernstein and in this video—the second installment of my two-part introduction
to the Romantic Period in American literature—I’m going to talk to you about.
. .
3 Important Concerns of the American Romantics (which were also some of the same concerns
of the British Romantics who preceded them)
1.
Romantics were sensitive to how the forces of industrialization distanced man from nature
as well as from his own “true nature.”
They often emphasized the importance of living in closer harmony with the restorative powers
of nature.
Think about this issue in relation to Owen Warland’s character in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s
“The Artist of the Beautiful” and Emerson’s “Self-Reliance.”
2.
The Romantics were especially interested in liberation,
change, and renewal.
Emerson, for instance, was especially concerned with the ways individuals enslaved themselves
through unthinking obedience
to the customs of the past.
He offered innovative ways of thinking about
the complex relationship between free individuals and a free society.
3.
Romantics on both sides of the Atlantic were actively involved in creating new theories
of poetry and discovering innovative, more natural methods of composition.
Stephen Greenblatt explains that the revolutionary years generated a “feeling that this was
an age of new beginnings when, by discarding traditional procedures and outworn customs,
everything was possible, and not only in the political and social realm but in intellectual
and literary enterprises as well” (1318).
He argues that Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s Lyrical
Ballads (1798) set out to revolutionize, “on grounds analogous to the politics of democracy,
the theory and practice of poetry” (1318).
One way Romantics accomplished their revolutionary literary goals was by writing about “incidents
and situations from common life” and employing language that was “really spoken by men,”
especially by those who lived a “humble and rustic life” (1322).
The poetic revolution also involved breaking away from predecessors who “imposed on poetry
artificial conventions that distorted.
. .free and natural expression” (1318).
That is, they rejected the earlier belief that poetry was an art to be “practiced
by poets who have assimilated classical precedents, are aware of the `rules’ governing the kind
of poem they are writing,” and use “tested means to achieve foreknown effects upon an
audience” (1320).
In “The Poet,” for example, Emerson argues that
it is “not metres, but a metre-making argument, that makes a poem,--a thought so passionate
and alive, that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its
own, and adorns nature with a new thing” (450).
Keep this point about poetry in mind when we read Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass”
and “Song of Myself.”
The form and the style are developing organically out of Whitman’s ideas about America.
That’s it for our introduction.
Here is a brief review:
1.
Emphasizing how the forces of industrialization can distance man from nature
And also from own true nature
2.
Emphasis on liberation, change and, renewal
3.
Creating new theories of poetry and discovering natural forms of composition.