American Romanticism Research Paper

The artistic movement of Romanticism has spread through culture and has embodied a mass movement of art across the ages in response to the previous literary movement:
“The Enlightenment. Romanticism was a movement in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that marked mass reaction in literature, philosophy, art, religion, and politics from neoclassic and orthodoxy from the previous period.” (William and C. Hugh Holman) The most notable and studied sections of this movement spawns from the writing to of both American and English poets and authors. American romanticism was based more upon the excitement of human possibilities, the appreciation and beauty of nature and divinity, and the need to be free both spiritually and physically. While

It was made up of a group of authors who wrote and published between about 1820 and 1860 , when the U.S. was still in the process of taking root and a new country and in the works of developing a culture of it’s own. The early residents of this new America were faced with many new experiences and endless amounts of new land to explore and appreciate. Art wise, there were no set boundaries or rules established in America and this allowed the art movement within the country to produce completely new forms of music, art, dance, theatre, and philosophy. Also, Americans were the first fully functioning democratic government, meaning that these people were under a completely different governing system and thus lived different lives than those of their mother country: England. This resulted in early American authors reflecting on how all of these new experiences translated into feelings of awe, beauty, and pride in their new found nature. Early romanticism focused mainly on the themes of nature and themes similar to those found in Romanticism’s sister movement: Transcendentalism. Romanticism contained more dark and complex elements. Romanticism introduced the path way for many dark

ER’s values consisted of re-occurring themes such as art, nature, individual achievement, and the common man having the ability to achieve anything. The theme of art focused on the glorification and appreciate of an individual’s ability to produce art. Nature consisted of pastoral imagery and rural life, and served for the subjects of many romantic poems during this time; the romantic movement allowed the English to focus and appreciate the beauty and detail of the nature around them. Individual achievements were also re-occurring in romantic literature, this means that both the common man and the fictional character’s accomplishments and feats were appreciated and praised, from this movement the term, “Byronic Hero” emerged.