American Literature: History of American Literature Chapter 3: The Romantic Period, 1820

Transcendentalism

The Brahmin Poet

Two Reformers

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

France, and beyond—reached America around the year 1820, some twenty 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.”

Romantic ideas centered around art as inspiration, the spiritual and aesthetic dimension of

nature, and metaphors of organic growth. Art, rather than science, Romantics argued, could best

express universal truth. The Romantics underscored the importance of expressive art for the

individual and society. In his essay “The Poet” (1844), Ralph Waldo Emerson, perhaps the most

influential writer of the Romantic era, asserts:

For all men live by truth, and stand in need of expression. In love, in art, in avarice, inpolitics, in labor, in games, we study to utter our painful secret. The man is only half himself, the other half is his expression.

The development of the self became a major theme, self-awareness a primary method. If,

according to Romantic theory, self and nature were one, then 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 of humanity,

then the individual had a moral duty to reform social inequalities and relieve human suffering. The

idea of the “self”—which had 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 also 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.

Romanticism was affirmative and appropriate for most American poets and creative essayists.

America’s vast mountains, deserts, and tropics embodied the sublime. The Romantic spirit seemed

particularly suited to American democracy: It stressed individualism, affirmed the value of the

common person, and looked to the inspired imagination for its aesthetic and ethical values.

Certainly the New England Transcendentalists—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau,

and their associates—were inspired to a new optimistic affirmation by the Romantic movement. In

New England, Romanticism had fallen upon fertile soil.

1. The Romantic Period brought about a change in the interpretation of the individual. The idea

of the “self” took on new meaning. Explain how it was redefined.

2. The term, “the sublime,” suggested

a. unrealistic aspirations.

b. beauty in grandeur.

c. attainable goals.

d. artistic freedom.

3. Briefly explain the idea of Romanticism as a philosophy, and why it so readily became

accepted by early New England society.

TRANSCENDENTALISM

The Transcendentalist movement was a reaction against 18th-century rationalism and a

manifestation of the general humanitarian trend of 19th-century thought. The movement

was based on a fundamental belief in the unity of the world and God. The soul of each individual

was thought to be identical with the world—a microcosm of the world itself. The doctrine of selfreliance and individualism developed through belief in the identification of the individual soul with God.

Transcendentalism was intimately connected with Concord, a small New England village

twenty miles west of Boston. Concord had been the first inland settlement of the original

Massachusetts Bay Colony. Surrounded by forest, it was and remains a peaceful town close enough

to Boston’s lectures, bookstores, and colleges to be intensely cultivated, but far enough away to be

serene. Concord was the site of the first battle of the American Revolution, and Ralph Waldo

Emerson’s poem commemorating the battle, “Concord Hymn,” has one of the most famous opening

stanzas in American literature:

By the rude bridge that arched the floodTheir flag to April’s breeze unfurled,Here once the embattled farmers stoodAnd fired the shot heard round the world.

Concord was the first rural artist’s colony, and the first place to offer a spiritual and cultural

alternative to American materialism. It was a place of high-minded conversation and simple living

(Emerson and Henry David Thoreau both had vegetable gardens). Emerson, who moved to Concord

in 1834, and Thoreau are most closely associated with the town, but the locale also attracted the

novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, the feminist writer Margaret Fuller, the educator (and father of

novelist Louisa May Alcott) Bronson Alcott, and the poet William Ellery Channing. The

Transcendental Club was loosely organized in 1836 and included, at various times, Emerson,

Thoreau, Fuller, Channing, Bronson Alcott, Orestes Brownson (a leading minister), and Theodore

Parker (abolitionist and minister).

The Transcendentalists published a quarterly magazine, The Dial, which lasted for four years

and was edited first by Margaret Fuller and later by Emerson. Reform efforts engaged them as well

as literature. A number of Transcendentalists were abolitionists, and some were involved in

experimental utopian communities such as nearby Brook Farm (described in Hawthorne’s The

Blithedale Romance) and Fruitlands.

Unlike many European groups, the Transcendentalists never issued a manifesto. They insisted

on individual differences and on the unique viewpoint of the individual. American Transcendental

Romantics pushed radical individualism to the extreme. American writers often saw themselves as

lonely explorers outside of society and convention. The American hero—like Herman Melville’s

Captain Ahab, Mark Twain’s Huck Finn, or Edgar Allan Poe’s Arthur Gordon Pym—typically faced

risk or even certain destruction in the pursuit of metaphysical self-discovery. For the Romantic

American writer, nothing was a given. Literary and social conventions, far from being helpful, were

dangerous. There was tremendous pressure to discover an authentic literary form, content, and

voice—all at the same time. It is clear from the many masterpieces produced in the three decades

before the U.S. Civil War (1861–1865) that U.S. writers rose to the challenge.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the towering figure of his era, had a religious sense of mission. Although

many accused him of subverting Christianity, he explained that for him “to be a good minister, it

was necessary to leave the church.” The address he delivered in 1838 at his alma mater, the

Harvard Divinity School, made him unwelcome at Harvard for thirty years thereafter. In this

speech, Emerson accused the church of acting “as if God were dead” and of emphasizing dogma

while stifling the spirit.

Emerson’s philosophy has been called contradictory, and it is true that he consciously avoided

building a logical intellectual system. He reasoned that such a rational system would have negated

his Romantic belief in intuition and flexibility. In his essay, “Self-Reliance,” Emerson remarks: “A

foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” Yet he is remarkably consistent in his call for

the birth of an American individualism inspired by nature. Most of Emerson’s major ideas—the

need for a new national vision, the use of personal experience, the notion of the cosmic Over-Soul,

and the doctrine of compensation—were suggested in his first publication, Nature (1836). This

essay began:

Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies,histories, criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs. Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past . . . ? The sun shines today also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.

Emerson loved the aphoristic genius of the 16th-century French essayist Montaigne, and he

once told Bronson Alcott that he wanted to write a book like Montaigne’s, “full of fun, poetry,

business, divinity, philosophy, anecdotes, smut.” He complained that Alcott’s abstract style omitted

“the light that shines on a man’s hat, in a child’s spoon.”

Spiritual vision and practical, aphoristic expression make Emerson exhilarating; one of the

Concord Transcendentalists aptly compared listening to him with “going to heaven in a swing.”

Much of his spiritual insight comes from his readings in Eastern religion, especially Hinduism,

Confucianism, and Islamic Sufism. For example, his poem “Brahma” relies on Hindu sources to

assert a cosmic order beyond the limited perception of mortals:

If the red slayer think he slayOr the slain think he is slain,They know not well the subtle waysI keep, and pass, and turn again.Far or forgot to me is nearShadow and sunlight are the same;The vanished gods to me appear;And one to me are shame and fame.They reckon ill who leave me out;When me they fly, I am the wings;I am the doubter and the doubt,And I the hymn the Brahmin singsThe strong gods pine for my abode,And pine in vain the sacred Seven,

But thou, meek lover of the good!

Find me, and turn thy back on heaven.

This poem, published in the first number of the Atlantic Monthly magazine (1857), confused

readers unfamiliar with Brahma, the highest Hindu god, the eternal and infinite soul of the

universe. Emerson had this advice for his readers: “Tell them to say Jehovah instead of Brahma.”

The British critic Matthew Arnold said the most important writings in English in the 19th

century had been Wordsworth’s poems and Emerson’s essays. A great prose-poet, Emerson

influenced a long line of American poets, including Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Edwin

Arlington Robinson, Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, and Robert Frost. He is also credited with

influencing the philosophies of John Dewey, George Santayana, Friedrich Nietzsche, and William

James.

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

Henry David Thoreau, of French and Scottish descent, was born in Concord and made it his

permanent home. Born into a poor family, as Emerson had been, he worked his way through

Harvard. Throughout his life, he reduced his needs to the simplest level and managed to live on

very little money, thus maintaining his independence. In essence, Thoreau made living his career.

A nonconformist, he attempted to live his life at all times according to his rigorous principles. This

attempt was the subject of many of his writings.

Thoreau’s masterpiece, Walden; Or Life in the Woods (1854), is the result of the two years, two

months, and two days (from 1845 to 1847) he spent living in a cabin he built at Walden Pond on

property owned by Emerson. In Walden, Thoreau consciously shapes this time into one year, and

the book is carefully constructed so that the seasons are subtly evoked in order. The book also is

organized so that the simplest earthly concerns come first (in the section called “Economy,” he

describes the expenses of building a cabin); by the ending, the book has progressed to meditations

on the stars.

In Walden, Thoreau, a lover of travel books and the author of several, has written an anti-travel

book that paradoxically opens the inner frontier of self-discovery as no American book had up to

this time. As deceptively modest as Thoreau’s ascetic life, the book is no less than a guide to living

the classical ideal of the good life. Both poetry and philosophy, this long poetic essay challenges the

reader to examine his or her life and to live it authentically. The building of the cabin, described in

great detail, is a concrete metaphor for the careful building of a soul. In his journal for January 30,

1852, Thoreau explains his preference for living rooted in one place: “I am afraid to travel much or

to famous places, lest it might completely dissipate the mind.”

Thoreau’s method of retreat and concentration resembled Asian meditation techniques. The

resemblance was not accidental; like Emerson and Whitman, he had been influenced by Hindu and

Buddhist philosophy. His most treasured possession was his library of Asian classics, which he

shared with Emerson. His eclectic style drew on Greek and Latin classics and is crystalline,

punning, and as richly metaphorical as the English metaphysical writers of the late Renaissance.

In Walden, Thoreau not only tested the theories of Transcendentalism, he re-enacted the

collective American experience of the 19th century: living on the frontier. Thoreau felt that his

contribution would be to renew a sense of the wilderness in language. His journal has an undated

entry from 1851:

English literature from the days of the minstrels to the Lake Poets, Chaucer and Spenser and Shakespeare and Milton included, breathes no quite fresh and in this sense, wild strain. It is an essentially tame and civilized literature, reflecting Greece and Rome. Her wilderness is a greenwood, her wildman a Robin Hood. There is plenty of genial love of nature in her poets, but not so much of nature herself. Her chronicles inform us when her wild animals, but not the wildman in her, became extinct. There was need of America.

Walden inspired William Butler Yeats, a passionate Irish nationalist, to write “The Lake Isle of

Innisfree,” while Thoreau’s essay “Civil Disobedience”—with its theory of passive resistance based

on the moral necessity for the just individual to disobey unjust laws—was an inspiration for

Mahatma Gandhi’s Indian independence movement and Martin Luther King’s struggle for African

Americans’ civil rights in the 20th century.

Thoreau is the most attractive of the Transcendentalists today because of his ecological

consciousness, do-it-yourself independence, ethical commitment to abolitionism, and political

theory of civil disobedience and peaceful resistance. His ideas are still fresh, and his incisive poetic

style and habit of close observation are still modern.

Walt Whitman (1819–1892)

Born on Long Island, New York, Walt Whitman was a part-time carpenter and man of the

people, whose brilliant, innovative work expressed the country’s democratic spirit. Whitman was

largely self-taught; he left school at the age of eleven to go to work, missing the sort of traditional

education that made most American authors respectful imitators of the English. His Leaves of

Grass (1855), which he rewrote and revised throughout his life, contains “Song of Myself,” the most

stunningly original poem ever written by an American. The enthusiastic praise that Emerson and

a few others heaped on this daring volume confirmed Whitman in his poetic vocation, although the

book itself was not a popular success.

A visionary book celebrating all of creation,

Leaves of Grass had largely been inspired by

Emerson’s writings, especially his essay, “The Poet,”

which predicted a robust, open-hearted, universal

kind of poet uncannily like Whitman himself. The

poem’s innovative, not rhyming, free-verse form,

open celebration of sexuality, vibrant democratic

sensibility, and extreme Romantic assertion that the

poet’s self was one with the poem, the universe, and

the reader permanently altered the course of

American poetry.

Leaves of Grass is as vast, energetic, and natural

as the American continent; it was the epic

generations of critics in the U.S. had been calling for,

although they did not recognize it. Movement ripples

through “Song of Myself” like restless music:

My ties and ballasts leave me . . .I skirt sierras, my palms cover continentsI am afoot with my vision.

Walt Whitman

The poem bulges with myriad concrete sights and sounds. Whitman’s birds are not the

conventional “winged spirits” of poetry. His “yellow-crown’d heron comes to the edge of the marsh at

night and feeds upon small crabs.” Whitman seems to project himself into everything that he sees or

imagines. He is mass man, “Voyaging to every port to dicker and adventure, / Hurrying with the

modern crowd as eager and fickle as any.” He is equally the suffering individual, “The mother of old,

condemn’d for a witch, burnt with dry wood, her children gazing on. . . . I am the hounded slave, I

wince at the bite of the dogs. . . . I am the mash’d fireman with breast-bone broken. . . . ”

More than any other writer, Whitman invented the myth of democratic America. “The

Americans of all nations at any time upon the earth have probably the fullest poetical nature. The

United States is essentially the greatest poem.” When Whitman wrote this, he daringly turned

upside down the general opinion that America was too brash and new to be poetic. He invented a

timeless America of the free imagination, peopled with pioneering spirits of all nations. D.H.

Lawrence, the British novelist and poet, accurately called Whitman the poet of the “open road.”

Whitman’s greatness is visible in many of his poems, among them “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,”

“Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” and “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” a moving

elegy on the death of Abraham Lincoln. Another important work is his long essay “Democratic

Vistas” (1871), written during the unrestrained materialism of industrialism’s “Gilded Age.” In this

essay, Whitman justly criticizes America for its “mighty, many-threaded wealth and industry” that

mask an underlying “dry and flat Sahara” of the soul. He calls for a new kind of literature to revive

the American population (“Not the book needs so much to be the complete thing, but the reader of

the book does”). Yet ultimately, Whitman’s main claim to immortality lies in his “Song of Myself.”

Here he places the Romantic self at the center of the consciousness of the poem:

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,

And what I assume you shall assume,

For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

Whitman’s voice electrifies even modern readers with his proclamation of the unity and vital

force of all creation. He was enormously innovative. From Whitman sprang the poem as

autobiography, the American Everyman as bard, the reader as creator, and the still-contemporary

discovery of “experimental,” or organic, form.

1. Define Transcendentalism. What were its tenets? In what way were they represented by the

writers of this school of thought?

2. Interpret this quote by Emerson: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”

Explain how he was a “traditional” student of the Transcendental school of thought.

3. Henry David Thoreau was known as a nonconformist. Choose the word or phrase from below

that is closest in meaning to this term.

a. follower

b. believer

c. one who forges his own path

d. one who does that which is expected by society

4. Describe the way in which Thoreau purposely structured his famous work, Walden.

5. Explain the purpose of Thoreau’s Walden. In your explanation, describe the metaphor upon

which it is based.

6. By which school of thought or philosophy was Thoreau most profoundly influenced?

a. European idealism

b. Puritan rationalism

c. Asian religion

d. Christianity

7. Identify one other famous writer or agent of change who was influenced by Thoreau’s work.

Describe the effect of this influence on the person’s beliefs.

8. Explain Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass in terms of its innovative characteristic and style.

How was it received by other poets? How was it received by society?

9. Whitman’s “Song of Myself” is an obvious poetic example of

a. Romanticism.

b. Quakerism.

c. Puritanism.

d. Rationalism.

THE BRAHMIN POETS

In their time, the Boston Brahmins (as the patrician, Harvard-educated class came to be

called) supplied the most respected and genuinely cultivated literary arbiters in the United

States. Their lives fitted a pleasant pattern of wealth and leisure, directed by the strong New

England work ethic and respect for learning.

In an earlier Puritan age, the Boston Brahmins would have been ministers; in the 19th century,

they became professors, often at Harvard. Late in life they sometimes became ambassadors or

received honorary degrees from European institutions. Most of them had traveled or had been

educated in Europe. They were familiar with the ideas and books of Britain, Germany, and France,

and often with those of Italy and Spain. Upper-class in background but democratic in sympathy, the

Brahmin poets carried their genteel, European-oriented views to every section of the United States.

They did this through public lectures at the 3,000 lyceums (centers for public lectures) and in the

pages of two influential Boston magazines, the North American Review and the Atlantic Monthly.

The writings of the Brahmin poets fused American and European traditions and sought to

create a continuity of shared Atlantic experience. These scholar-poets attempted to educate and

elevate the general populace by introducing a European dimension to American literature.

Ironically, their overall effect was conservative. By insisting on European images and forms, they

retarded the growth of a distinctive American consciousness. Well-meaning men, their conservative

backgrounds blinded them to the daring innovativeness of Thoreau, Whitman (whom they refused

to meet socially), and Edgar Allan Poe (whom even Emerson regarded as the “jingle man”). They

were pillars of what came to be called the “genteel tradition” that three generations of American

realists had to battle. Partly because of their benign but bland influence, it was almost a hundred

years before the distinctive American genius of Whitman, Melville, Thoreau, and Poe would be

generally recognized in the United States.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882)

The most important Boston Brahmin poets were Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell

Holmes, and James Russell Lowell. Longfellow, professor of modern languages at Harvard, was the

best-known American poet of his day. He was responsible for the misty, ahistorical, legendary sense

of the past that merged American and European traditions. He wrote three long narrative poems

popularizing native legends in European meters: “Evangeline” (1847), “The Song of Hiawatha”

(1855), and “The Courtship of Miles Standish” (1858).

Longfellow also wrote textbooks on modern languages and a travel book entitled Outre-Mer,

retelling foreign legends and patterned after Washington Irving’s Sketch Book. Although

conventionality, sentimentality, and facile handling mar the long poems, haunting short lyrics like

“The Jewish Cemetery at Newport” (1854), “My Lost Youth” (1855), and “The Tide Rises, The Tide

Falls” (1880) continue to give pleasure.

James Russell Lowell (1819–1891)

James Russell Lowell became a professor of modern languages at Harvard after Longfellow

retired and was the Matthew Arnold of American literature. He began as a poet but gradually lost

his poetic ability, ending as a respected critic and educator. As editor of the Atlantic and co-editor

of the North American Review, Lowell exercised enormous influence. Lowell’s A Fable for Critics

(1848) is a funny and apt appraisal of American writers, as in his comment: “There comes Poe, with

his raven, like Barnaby Rudge / Three-fifths of him genius and two-fifths sheer fudge.”

Under his wife’s influence, Lowell became a liberal reformer, abolitionist, and supporter both of

women’s suffrage and of laws ending child labor. His Biglow Papers, First Series (1847–1848)

creates Hosea Biglow, a shrewd but uneducated village poet who argues for reform in dialect poetry.

Benjamin Franklin and Phillip Freneau had used intelligent villagers as mouthpieces for social

commentary. Lowell writes in the same vein, linking the colonial “character” tradition with the new

realism and regionalism based on dialect that flowered in the 1850s and came to fruition in Mark

Twain.

Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–1894)

Oliver Wendell Holmes, a celebrated physician and professor of anatomy and physiology at

Harvard, is the hardest of the three well-known Brahmins to categorize because his work is marked

by a refreshing versatility. It encompasses collections of humorous essays (The Autocrat of the

Breakfast-Table, 1858), novels (Elsie Venner, 1861), biographies (Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1885), and

verse that could be sprightly (“The Deacon’s Masterpiece, or The Wonderful ‘One-Hoss Shay’ ”),

philosophical (“The Chambered Nautilus”), or fervently patriotic (“Old Ironsides”).

Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the suburb of Boston that is home to Harvard, Holmes was

the son of a prominent local minister. His mother was a descendant of the poet Anne Bradstreet. In

his time and even more so thereafter, Oliver Wendell Holmes symbolized wit, intelligence, and

charm not as a discoverer or a trailblazer, but rather as an exemplary interpreter of everything

from society and language to medicine and human nature.

1. The Brahmin poets were collectively known as

a. religious zealots.

b. aggressive reformers.

c. students of philosophy.

d. conservative intellects.

2. Briefly summarize the Brahmin style and describe the unintended effect the Brahmin poets

had on American literary style and attitude.

3. One of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s most famous narrative works was entitled

a. “The Road Not Taken.”

b. “Evangeline.”

c. “The Raven.”

d. “My Lost Youth.”

4. James Russell Lowell, while grouped with the Brahmin poets, actually became more of a

critic and reformer than a poet. Give a brief description of his work and initiatives.

5. Due to his amazing versatility in style, which Brahmin poet became the hardest to classify?

a. Oliver Wendell Holmes

b. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

c. Mark Twain

d. James Russell Lowell

TWO REFORMERS

new England sparkled with intellectual energy in the years before the Civil War. Some of

the stars that shine more brightly today than the famous constellation of Brahmins had

been dimmed by poverty or by accidents of gender or race in their own time. Modern readers

increasingly value the work of the abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier and the feminist and social

reformer Margaret Fuller.

John Greenleaf Whittier (1807–1892)

John Greenleaf Whittier, the most active poet of the era, had a background very similar to Walt

Whitman’s. Born and raised on a modest Quaker farm in Massachusetts, he had little formal

education and worked as a journalist. For decades before it became popular, he was an ardent

abolitionist. Whittier is respected for such anti-slavery poems as “Ichabod,” and his poetry is

sometimes viewed as an early example of regional realism.

Whittier’s sharp images, simple constructions, and ballad-like tetrameter couplets have the

simple earthy texture of Robert Burns. His best work, the long poem “Snow Bound,” vividly

recreates the poet’s deceased family members and friends as he remembers them from childhood,

huddled cozily around the blazing hearth during one of New England’s blustering snowstorms. This

simple, religious, intensely personal poem, coming after the long nightmare of the Civil War, is an

elegy for the dead and a healing hymn. It affirms the eternity of the spirit, the timeless power of

love in the memory, and the undiminished beauty of nature, which persists despite violent outer

political storms.

Margaret Fuller (1810–1850)

Margaret Fuller, an outstanding essayist, was born and raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Coming from a modest financial background, she was educated at home by her father (women were

not allowed to attend Harvard) and became a child prodigy in the classics and modern literatures.

Her special passion was German Romantic literature, especially Goethe, whom she translated.

The first professional woman journalist of note in America, Fuller wrote influential book

reviews and reports on social issues such as the treatment of women prisoners and the insane.

Some of these essays were published in her book Papers on Literature and Art (1846). A year earlier,

she had her most significant book, Woman in the Nineteenth Century. It originally had appeared in

the Transcendentalist magazine, The Dial, which she edited from 1840 to 1842.

Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century is the earliest and most American exploration of

women’s role in society. Often applying democratic and Transcendental principles, Fuller

thoughtfully analyzes the numerous subtle causes and evil consequences of sexual discrimination

and suggests positive steps to be taken. Many of her ideas are strikingly modern. She stresses the

importance of “self-dependence,” which women lack because “they are taught to learn their rule

from without, not to unfold it from within.”

Fuller is finally not a feminist so much as an activist and a reformer dedicated to the cause of

creative human freedom and dignity for all:

. . . Let us be wise and not impede the soul. . . . Let us have one creative energy. . . . Let it take

what form it will, and let us not bind it by the past to man or woman, black or white.

Emily Dickinson (1830–1886)

Emily Dickinson is, in a sense, a link between her era and the literary sensitivities of the turn

of the century. A radical individualist, she was born and spent her life in Amherst, Massachusetts,

a small Calvinist village. Although she never married, she led an unconventional life that was

outwardly uneventful but was full of inner intensity. She loved nature and found

deep inspiration in the birds, animals, plants, and changing seasons of the

New England countryside.

Dickinson spent the latter part of her life as a recluse, due to an

extremely sensitive psyche and possibly also to make time for

writing (for stretches of time she wrote about one poem a day). Her

day also included homemaking for her attorney father, a

prominent figure in Amherst who became a member of Congress.

Dickinson was not widely read, but she knew the Bible, the

works of William Shakespeare, and works of classical mythology

in great depth. These were her true teachers, for Dickinson was

certainly the most solitary literary figure of her time. That this

shy, withdrawn, village woman, almost unpublished and unknown,

created some of the greatest American poetry of the 19th century

has fascinated the public since the 1950s, when her poetry was

rediscovered.

Dickinson’s terse, frequently imagistic style is even more modern

and innovative than Whitman’s. She never used two words when one

would do, and combined concrete things with abstract ideas in an almost proverbial, compressed

style. Her best poems have no fat; many mock current sentimentality, and some are even heretical.

She sometimes showed a terrifying existential awareness. Like Poe, she explored the dark and

hidden part of the mind, dramatizing death and the grave. Yet she also celebrated simple objects—

a flower, a bee. Her poetry exhibits great intelligence and often evokes the agonizing paradox of the

limits of the human consciousness trapped in time. She had an excellent sense of humor, and her

range of subjects and treatment is amazingly wide. Her poems are generally known by the numbers

assigned them in Thomas H. Johnson’s standard edition of 1955. They bristle with odd

capitalizations and dashes.

A nonconformist, like Thoreau, Emily Dickinson often reversed meanings of words and phrases

and used paradox to great effect. From 435:

Much Madness is divinest sense—To a discerning Eye—Much Sense—the starkest Madness—‘Tis the MajorityIn this, as All, prevail—Assent—and you are sane—Demur—you’re straightway dangerousAnd handled with a chain—Her wit shines in the following poem (288), which ridicules ambition and public life:I’m Nobody! Who are you?Are you—Nobody—Too?

Then there’s a pair of us?Don’t tell! they’d advertise—youknow!How dreary—to be—Somebody!How public—like a Frog—To tell one’s name—the livelongJune—To an admiring Bog!

Dickinson’s 1,775 poems continue to intrigue critics, who often disagree about them. Some

stress her mystical side, some her sensitivity to nature; many note her odd, exotic appeal. One

modern critic, R.P. Blackmur, comments that Dickinson’s poetry sometimes feels as if “a cat came

at us speaking English.” Her clean, clear, chiseled poems are some of the most fascinating and

challenging in American literature.

1. Explain the literal content of John Greenleaf Whittier’s poem, “Snowbound.” Then, describe

its figurative meaning or the intended metaphor.

2. Margaret Fuller, once a child prodigy in literature, became an outstanding essayist known

for her journalism and articles pertaining to women’s roles in society. Briefly describe her

writing style in terms of content and message. What was the goal of her writing?

3. Emily Dickinson’s successes were more fascinating than those of other writers because she

a. was never formally educated.

b. lived as a recluse for a good portion of her life.

c. was deaf and dumb.

d. had a very simple and uncultured upbringing.

4. In no more than two or three sentences, try to describe Emily Dickinson’s style of writing.

5. Dickinson’s line, “Much Madness is divinest sense,” is an example of her frequent use of

a. personification.

b. comparison.

c. simile.

d. paradox.

American Literature

Wednesday, April 22, 2020

History of American Literature Chapter 3: The Romantic Period, 1820–1860: Essayists and Poets

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