Often considered the first
period of American creativity, the Romantic period is placed within the
historical context of westward expansion, the increasingly heated nature of the
slavery question, and strained relations between the opposing desires for reform
and separation found in the North and the South. Historically, this period
of tensions resulted in the Civil War. Within the literature, however, the
opposing views of life were able to co-exist relatively peacefully .
Romanticism is typically
defined as a "literary and philosophical theory that tends to see the individual
at the center of all life, and it places the individual, therefore, at the
center of art, making literature valuable as an expression of unique feelings
and particular attitudes and valuing its fidelity in portraying experiences,
however fragmentary and incomplete, more than its adherence to completeness,
unity, or the demands of the genre. Although romanticism tends at times to
regard nature as alien, it more often sees in nature a revelation of Truth . . .
and a more suitable subject for art than those aspects of the world sullied by
artifice. Romanticism seeks to find the Absolute, the Ideal, by
transcending the actual" (A Handbook to Literature). Simply stated,
Romanticism is a movement wherein artists reacted to the constraints of Realism
(think along the lines of Benjamin Franklin's painstakingly realistic
autobiography) and moved toward the individual as a creative being. Oftentimes, the language of this period is less formalized than previous
periods, nature is a reflection of man, and simplicity is prized over the
conventions of the past. A movement within this movement is
Transcendentalism which emphasized the importance of nature and the "dignity of
manual labor," and the most influential Transcendentalist was Ralph Waldo
Emerson. Literature expanded to include novels, essays, and lectures.
Romanticism was a literary revolution.