Today we use the term romantic to describe someone who is especially eager to build a strong and compelling connection to a lover or a spouse. When used to describe the art and literature of the early 1800s, though, the term has a very different meaning, especially when spelled with a capital R. Romanticism, which was both a literary movement and a more general movement in the arts, emphasized the power of emotions to override the purely rational or logical aspects of human consciousness.
Reacting against the Age of Reason's emphasis on the intellect, Romantic artists and writers chose subjects that were considered more "passionate" or sensual, such as the beauty and wild energy of the natural world. They also tended to idealize characters from rural backgrounds, glorifying the self-reliant way of life that was prevalent before the Industrial Revolution. The Romantics lived and wrote during the time when the country first shifted from a purely agricultural economy to an equally industrial one. This trend drew people to cities and put them to work in factories, settings that did little to enrich the mind or soul.
Romantic writers used existing forms that suited their purposes, such as poetry, but also created or promoted new forms. Use these slides to preview the types of literature that the Romantics favored.
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Tall Tales The short story was relatively new as a literary form in the early 1800s, but the Romantics quickly made it a very popular form. A natural outgrowth of folk and fairy tales, many of the short stories written during the Romantic era included plot lines lifted from local tales. "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," which you may know as a movie or television show, was written during this time.
Fireside Poems Poetry had been around for centuries when the Romantics began writing their own verse, which emphasized the beauty and inspirational power of nature. In America, in particular, reading poems together as a family beside the fireplace after the day's work was done was a typical pastime. Thus, the poems written by American poets of the era found an eager audience and earned their writers great fame (and even some fortune) in their own lifetimes.
Popular Philosophy During the Romantic era, American writers created a new form of literature, one that seemed to merge the descriptive style of journals written by early European settlers with the more rhetorical approach of texts written during the Revolutionary era. Writers Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau described the natural scenery around them in exquisite detail, just as John Smith did, but their purpose was to argue—passionately—for the value of humans' connection to nature and to the physical work needed to survive. According to these writers, the spiritual and intellectual gifts gained through more "self-reliant" daily living far outweighed the profit to be had from industrialization. |
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Question
What two literary forms were combined in the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau?
