Romanticism And Romanticism

1523 Words7 Pages
Romanticism was a movement in the 18th century that was a response to the Enlightenment, which was the movement that stated that everything should be based on facts and reason (Ziegenfus, 2017). Romanticism stated that feelings and emotions are just as important as reason and logic in understanding everything in the world (Romanticism Movement, n.d.). Romanticism strongly affected the writings of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson and can be seen in the poems “A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and Dim” (Whitman, 1867), “O Me! O Life!” (Whitman, 1867), and “Tell all the truth but tell it Slant” (Dickinson, n.d.).
“A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and Dim” was written by Walt Whitman during the Civil War around 1861 (Norman and Allen, 2017). During that time, knowledge was supposed to be based on pure facts and be emotionless. Walt Whitman strayed from this way of thinking. He believed that emotion and passion should fill people’s hearts and inspire them to grow in their knowledge, that way knowledge would become a beautiful idea instead of a boring, dull one. Which is why Whitman wrote the poem “A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and Dim.” The poem begins with Whitman waking up and seeing three dead bodies of his fallen comrades. He notices how the first body is an elderly man, the second is a little boy, and then it ends with the third dead body being that of Jesus Christ. The poem states “A SIGHT in camp in the daybreak grey and dim, / As from my tent I emerge so