American Romanticism Lecture Notes

* In 1819, a British observer noted the general perception of American

literary and artistic culture:

"In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book? Or
looks at an American picture?"

"The Americans have no national literature, and no learned men. The

talents of our transatlantic brethren show themselves chiefly in
political pamphlets.

* Great ferment over the next three years:

-Persuasive writing gave way to entertainment, and a focus on the present

world rather than afterworld

-New styles emerged: short story, detective story, humor, etc.

Romanticism
Early American writing was dominated by Age of Reason and its dominant
philosophy, Classicism , characterized by reason, clarity, balance, and
order)

Romanticism was a reaction to Classicism but retained the ideals of

equality, freedom, and individualism set forth in the Declaration of
Independence.

Key Romantic elements

• An emphasis on imagination as a key to revealing the innermost depths

of human spirit;

• A great interest in picturesque and exotic aspects of the past

• Enthusiasm for portraying national life and character and common man

• Celebration of beauty and mystery of nature

• Fascination with supernatural and gothic

• Interest in exotic, especially Far Eastern, ideas

• Sense of idealism

The Importance of Landscape

The American landscape was not the Rhine or the Lake District . It was not
quaint, did not have ruins or castles, yet it held both extreme danger and
extreme promise. Keep this in mind.
AMERICAN RENAISSANCE

(Adapted from http://usinfo.state.gov/products/pubs/oal/oaltoc.htm )

The Romantic Period, 1820-1860

The Romantic movement, which originated in Germany but quickly spread to

England , France , and beyond, reached America around the year 1820,
some 20 years after William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge had
revolutionized English poetry by publishing Lyrical Ballads . In America as
in Europe , fresh new vision electrified artistic and intellectual circles. Yet
there was an important difference: Romanticism in America coincided with
the period of national expansion and the discovery of a distinctive
American voice. The solidification of a national identity and the surging
idealism and passion of Romanticism nurtured the masterpieces of "the
American Renaissance."

The development of the self became a major theme; self- awareness a

primary method. If, according to Romantic theory, self and nature were
one, self-awareness was not a selfish dead end but a mode of knowledge
opening up the universe. If one's self were one with all humanity, then the
individual had a moral duty to reform social inequalities and relieve human
suffering. The idea of "self" -- which suggested selfishness to earlier
generations -- was redefined. New compound words with positive meanings
emerged: "self-realization," "self-expression," "self- reliance."

As the unique, subjective self became important, so did the realm of

psychology. Exceptional artistic effects and techniques were developed to
evoke heightened psychological states. The "sublime" -- an effect of beauty
in grandeur (for example, a view from a mountaintop) -- produced feelings
of awe, reverence, vastness, and a power beyond human comprehension.

Lecture Notes on Poe

I. Biographical Background

Kenneth Silverman argues that Poe's work is shadowed by the deaths of three
women he loved intensely (in addition to Poe's best-known inspiration, his beloved
young wife Virginia):

1. his mother (when he was about 2 years old)

2. Jane Stanard (idealized mother of a school friend), who died insane at age
28 ("To Helen")
3. Frances Allan (his foster mother)

II. Major Phases of Poe's Career

A. 1827-1831. 3 slim volumes of poetry expressed a strong attachment to the

romantic myth of a pastoral and poetic ideal, made up of dreams and memories of
Eden.
 B. 1831 marked a transition year: moved to Baltimore (1831-1835); wrote
"Israfel," "Romance," "To Helen"
1. His work during this period expressed a new commitment to a poetry of
heartfelt conviction in the face of life's burdens and sorrows.

2. From 1831-41 Poe experienced a radical change; his works involved the theme
of death as a finality in a cosmic void of darkness and silence.

a. "Ligeia" appeared Baltimore American Museum in September 1838

b. "The Fall of the House of Usher" appeared in September, 1839 in Burton's
Gentleman's Magazine
c. December 1839: Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque

C. 1841-1849: A return to poetry and essays and fiction on theme of psychic

transcendentalism. 1845 was his most successful year. Feb: The Raven appeared in
the February American Review after advance publication in the New York Evening
Mirror.

III. Types of Works

Through all these phases, Poe wrote

1. Satiric tales.
2. Parodies and burlesques.
3. Grotesques: tales where one aspect of the character is heightened for a marked
effect (note that this same concept was later used by Sherwood Anderson in
Winesburg, Ohio).

* "Grotesque" in Poe also implies a clash of opposites, a world in which the

reader's certainties are undercut. Its fundamental element is disharmony, what Philip
Thomson has called "the unresolved clash of incompatibles in work and response"
(27).

* Wolfgang Kayser, The Grotesque in Art and Literature: "The various forms of the
grotesque are the most obvious and pronounced contradictions of any kind of
rationalism and any systematic use of thought" (185).

# Arabesques: tales involving the supernatural; according to Paul Reubens, "symbolic

fantasies of the human condition."
# Tales of ratiocination ("The Purloined Letter") that allow rational deduction and
logic to counter the irrationality of grotesques and arabesques.
# Hoaxes
III. Themes (from Floyd Stovall)

Stovall called Coleridge the guiding spirit of Poe's intellectual life

A. Parallels with Coleridge

1. poetry gives pleasure by being indefinite
2. music is an essential element in poetry
3. beauty is the sole province of the poem
4. poetic beauty has the quality of strangeness
5. poem must have unity of effect
6. true poem must be brief
7. passion and poetry are discordant
8. tone of the poem must be melancholy B. Parallels with Wordsworth
 1. Visionary dreariness (from The Prelude [published in 1850 and unknown to
Poe]: Wordsworth writes of "spots of time" that stand as memorials permitting the
restoration of our minds when they are "depressed." The power of these moments
comes from their revelation that "the mind is lord and master--outward sense/the
obedient servant of her will."

2. "The Fall of the House of Usher" hinges on questions of self-identity and the
powers of the mind for restoration" (Cambridge Literary History 659). In German
Romantic theory, the sublime derived precisely from the power of the mind over
nature; one of its essential qualities is the presence not only of appreciation of
nature's beauty but awe in its presence. The true sublime contains an element of
fear, of the possibility of danger that resides in nature.

In "Usher," the narrator's utter depression allows no sense of the "visionary"

qualities of dreariness that so powerfully moved Wordsworth . . . In this story the
pattern of differentiated repetition shows the power of things, the consciousness of
urban fragmentation against which Wordsworth was writing, but from within which
Poe writes."

3. Poe: "As to Wordsworth, I have no faith in him."

C. Themes
1. victimization, power and powerlessness
2. confrontations with mysterious presences
3. extreme states of being
4. dehumanization and its cure
5. relation of body and soul
6. memory of and mourning for the dead
7. need for spiritual transcendence and affirmation.

D. Beliefs

1. That the dead are not entirely dead to consciousness

2. That it is best to live in hopes that love can transcend death.
3. That one must apprehend the possibility of beauty beyond the grave.

IV. "The Raven"

A. To Poe, Barrett wrote: "Your 'Raven' has produced a sensation, a "fit

horror" here in England. Some of my friends are taken by the fear of it and some by
the music. I hear of persons haunted by the "Nevermore," and one acquaintance of
mine who has the misfortune of possessing a "bust of Pallas" can never bear to look
at it in the twilight."

B. Symbolic raven parallels Coleridge's albatross, Shelley's skylark, Keats's

nightingale.

o C. From a spectator's account: Poe wore black, and, adjusting the

atmosphere to suit the mood of his work, "would turn down the lamps till the room
was almost dark. Standing in the center of the apartment he would recite those
wonderful lines in the most melodious of voices. So marvelous was his power as a
reader that the auditors would be afraid to draw breath lest the enchanted spell be
broken." Elmira Royster Shelton: "When Edgar read 'The Raven,' he became so wildly
excited that he frightened me, and when I remonstrated with him he replied he could
not help it--that it set his brain on fire."
Edgar Allan Poe
o Edgar Allan Poe, a southerner, shares with Herman Melville a darkly
metaphysical vision mixed with elements of realism, parody, and burlesque. He
refined the short story genre and invented detective fiction. Many of his stories
prefigure the genres of science fiction, horror, and fantasy so popular today.

o Poe believed that strangeness was an essential ingredient of beauty, and his
writing is often exotic. His stories and poems are populated with doomed,
introspective aristocrats (Poe, like many other southerners, cherished an aristocratic
ideal). These gloomy characters never seem to work or socialize; instead they bury
themselves in dark, moldering castles symbolically decorated with bizarre rugs and
draperies that hide the real world of sun, windows, walls, and floors. The hidden
rooms reveal ancient libraries, strange art works, and eclectic oriental objects. The
aristocrats play musical instruments or read ancient books while they brood on
tragedies, often the deaths of loved ones. Themes of death-in-life, especially being
buried alive or returning like a vampire from the grave, appear in many of his works,
including "The Premature Burial," "Ligeia," "The Cask of Amontillado," and "The Fall
of the House of Usher." Poe's twilight realm between life and death and his gaudy,
Gothic settings are not merely decorative. They reflect the overcivilized yet deathly
interior of his characters disturbed psyches. They are symbolic expressions of the
unconscious, and thus are central to his art.

o Poe's verse, like that of many Southerners, was very musical and strictly
metrical. His best-known poem, in his own lifetime and today, is "The Raven" (1845).
In this eerie poem, the haunted, sleepless narrator, who has been reading and
mourning the death of his "lost Lenore" at midnight, is visited by a raven (a bird that
eats dead flesh, hence a symbol of death) who perches above his door and ominously
repeats the poem's famous refrain, "nevermore."

o Poe's stories -- such as those cited above -- have been described as tales of
horror. Stories like "The Gold Bug" and "The Purloined Letter" are more tales of
ratiocination, or reasoning. The horror tales prefigure works by such American
authors of horror fantasy as H.P. Lovecraft and Stephen King, while the tales of
ratiocination are harbingers of the detective fiction of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond
Chandler, Ross Macdonald, and John D. MacDonald. There is a hint, too, of what was
to follow as science fiction. All of these stories reveal Poe's fascination with the mind
and the unsettling scientific knowledge that was radically secularizing the 19th-
century world view.

o In every genre, Poe explores the psyche. Profound psychological insights glint
throughout the stories. "Who has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a
vile or silly action, for no other reason than because he knows he should not," we
read in "The Black Cat." To explore the exotic and strange aspect of psychological
processes, Poe delved into accounts of madness and extreme emotion. The painfully
deliberate style and elaborate explanation in the stories heighten the sense of the
horrible by making the events seem vivid and plausible.

o Poe's combination of decadence and romantic primitivism appealed

enormously to Europeans, particularly to the French poets Stéphane Mallarmé,
Charles Baudelaire, Paul Valéry, and Arthur Rimbaud. But Poe is not un-American,
despite his aristocratic disgust with democracy, preference for the exotic, and
themes of dehumanization. On the contrary, he is almost a textbook example of
Tocqueville's prediction that American democracy would produce works that lay bare
the deepest, hidden parts of the psyche. Deep anxiety and psychic insecurity seem
to have occurred earlier in America than in Europe, for Europeans at least had a firm,
complex social structure that gave them psychological security. In America, there
was no compensating security; it was every man for himself. Poe accurately
described the underside of the American dream of the self-made man and showed
the price of materialism and excessive competition -- loneliness, alienation, and
images of death-in-life.

o Poe's "decadence" also reflects the devaluation of symbols that occurred in

the 19th century -- the tendency to mix art objects promiscuously from many eras
and places, in the process stripping them of their identity and reducing them to
merely decorative items in a collection. The resulting chaos of styles was particularly
noticeable in the United States, which often lacked traditional styles of its own. The
jumble reflects the loss of coherent systems of thought as immigration, urbanization,
and industrialization uprooted families and traditional ways. In art, this confusion of
symbols fueled the grotesque, an idea that Poe explicitly made his theme in his
classic collection of stories, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840).