What are the differences between American Romanticism and American Realism

romanticism
American Romanticism

The romantic period in Britain runs from 1790 until 1830. In America the Romantic period runs from about 1800 until 1860. So we can see that the Romantic Movement in America began a few years after it’s European cousin and continues for a much longer period after.

Examples of European Writers; Wordsworth, Blake, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Byron, Goethe, Schelling. Important American Romantic Writers:

Washington Irving

James Fenimoore Cooper

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Henry David Thoreau

Herman Melville

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Walt Whitman

Edgar Allen Poe

European and especially British romanticism was a big influence on American writers. The important influences to remember are-

Gothic- gothic writers such as Ann Radcliffe, who wrote such works as The Mysteries of Udolfo, and The Italian, Matthew Lewis and, the tales of E.T.A. Hoffman all were influential. Gothic themes include solitude, ghosts, the natural world, darkness, death, doubling of characters and the devil.
Sir Walter Scott- his border tales, where he writes of Scotland in a way that describes it as a wilderness was a big influence on James Fenimore Cooper, who wrote of American wilderness. The book says “Scott was, in a way, responsible for the romantic description of landscape in American literature”. (41).
Oriental Romances- these were an influence on the attempt by American Romanticists to develop a literature that dealt with American Indians, as writers like Longfellow, Cooper and Freneau all tried to do. The important texts here were Byron’s tales such as Manfred, The Corsair and Lara, all of which dealt thematically with people of different cultures (in this case Muslims in the middle East), and these were adapted by the American writers.
Wordsworth and Coleridge- firstly because of Lyrical Ballads, which was one of the very first “democratic” books of poetry- it wrote in very ordinary language of the concerns of common people, without using poetic artifice. In a nation such as America, this was very important, as it matched what writers were trying to do in a land that was seen by Americans as totally democratic and egalitarian: as Crevecouer says “We are the most perfect society now existing in the world. Here man is as free as he ought to be; nor is this pleasing equality so transient as others are.” (39). Stylistically the book was also important in that it used traditional ballad forms which American writers adopted for their own ends- eg Longfellow, give examples on p170+. Secondly, because of the reverence that these poets felt for nature. Both Coleridge and Wordsworth found that there was holiness present in Nature that was beneficial to the spirit of man- quote here....??????? This proved to be a big influence on the New England Transcendentalists, who we shall study in the next class, who combined Romantic and Puritan attitudes towards nature, and also they were a big influence on Walt Whitman.
Politics. All of the important English Romantic poets held very radical, democratic ideas as to how society should be governed. They all disliked monarchy, and social privilege, and believed that ordinary men and women should have more of an influence on the way that government was run. Since Americans were so proud of their own country being a democracy and a republic (no king) this theme too found a ready audience in America. English Romantics were all influenced by the French revolution, which they saw as a model way of governing society, and this was reflected in America, in writers such as Thomas Paine.
Interest in folk culture. The German writers, the Brothers Grimm, and Hoffman drew on folk tales and stories in their work- as Washington Irving does in his Sketch Book stories.

Differences.

Yet we cannot say that American Romanticism was a mere copy of European Romanticism. There were a number off factors that made it unique to the country.

Newness. For Americans in the early 19th century, their country and their landscape was an entirely new one. Unlike in Europe, where landscape always carried with it overtones of history – cf. “Tintern Abbey”- America seemed to be an entirely fresh and new land, one that did not have lots of traces of continuous human habitation on it. America was on the whole a wilderness, undiscovered and unspoiled. The trees and wildlife were totally different. So there were no nightingales or skylarks, but different birds, and trees that in Europe carried a symbolic power- such as the oak for wisdom, or the yew tree for age- did not exist here. The newness of the whole place meant that even fairly ordinary, day-to-day things were very interesting, and lots of American writers wrote about ordinary events in a way that made them fresh and exciting. Irving wrote of the Hudson Valley, William Cullen Bryant wrote of the wild west as did Cooper. On the other hand, some writers felt that this newness also meant an absence of history. Washington Irving was attracted to Europe because he felt that it had history- on page 54 – “Europe held forth the charms of storied and poetical associations...the accumulated treasures of ages.” Etc....
Puritanism. Although in the early nineteenth century, America was a significantly less religious society than it had been 100 years before, Puritanism remained a strong influence. The public opinion was still overwhelmingly Puritan, and this meant that American Romanticism was more Puritan than its European counterpart. This happened in two ways. Firstly American writers were often very didactic- they did not hesitate to moralize about the people they were writing about. Washington Irving takes a moralistic tone towards his characters, though he is also quite kind and charitable towards their faults. The other result of Puritanism was that certain topics remained off limits- specifically sex. Romanticism in England had often engaged with this topic- The Monk talks of fetishism and incest, Coleridge’s “Christabel” talks of a lesbian relationship, Shelley was a great believer in free love (“Epipsychidion”) and Byron based his public persona in a large part on his attractiveness to women. In America, authors were more reticent. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne talks of adultery, but only in terms of its effects on people, but not of the act itself. Edgar Allen Poe, though very graphic in lots of ways was also very prudish when it came to sex and love.
The ideals of Americans were also different. They thought of America as a new Garden of Eden, and believed strongly in individualism and equality, to the extent that they saw themselves as a new kind of man- a pioneer. This pioneering spirit was different from European Romanticism, where man used nature as a retreat, rather than something to be explored. Later Romantic writers, such as Emerson, in his “The American Scholar” and Whitman gave expression to this new kind of man.
Optimism. I spoke last week of the optimistic character of the Puritans, and the idea of optimism continues throughout American Romanticism. European Romantics were on the whole a pessimistic bunch, who wrote a lot about the negative states of feeling: Shelley’s “Dejection: An Ode”, Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther, and Keats’ Ode to Melancholy. American Romantics did not dwell on the bad parts of human feeling; rather they concentrated on the good emotions- joy, love, happiness etc.

There were also other differences between American and European Romanticism.

Childhood. “The child is the father to the man” said Wordsworth. The idea of childhood as the central defining factor in a person’s life was central to the European Romantic imagination, but American romanticism did not place such a great an emphasis on it.
Industry. The Industrial/bourgeoisie revolution took place in England from 1750 onwards. The new kind of society it built up- where some people got very rich of the work of others, the filthy living conditions, inhuman working conditions, that made men seem scarcely human, etc... made the city and the modern world something that Romantic poets in Europe flee from- eg. Coleridge, “This Lime-tree Bower, my Prison” or Keats’ “To One who has been Long in the City Pent”. In America on the other hand, the attitude was different. America was becoming very wealthy very quickly, and this growing economic confidence, coupled with a growing sense of political confidence, meant that as a nation American writers were less concerned with the problems of industrialization and money.

Problems of American Romanticism

Society. Although they referred to equality and democracy as founding aspects of their identity, American Romanticists were often less committed to attacking the social problems of the day, such as slavery and the question of what to do with American Indians.
Derivative. Lots of American poets copied English ones, quite obviously. The New England Poets, Longfellow, William Bryant, John Whittier and Oliver Wendell Holmes, all copied English authors , such as Cowper, Dryden and Pope, who were, and are, not popular even in England. So the poetry can sound very dated to modern ears, as often it was quite clearly aping the past masters.