1. Imagination and the Individual
American Romanticism
Imagination and the Individual
We will walk on our own feet:
We will work with our own hands;
We will speak our own minds.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

2. A Psychological Voyage to the Country of the Imagination
The Journey
The journey – there is probably no pattern so common in all of narrative literature, from the Bible to Homer’s Odyssey to films like The Wizard of Oz and Star Wars.
Moral Clarity
Healthful Living.
Independence
A Psychological Voyage to the Country of the Imagination
Whatever the destination of the Romantic Journey, it is a flight both from something and to something.

3. The Romantic Sensibility: Celebrating Imagination
To the Romantic mind, poetry was the highest embodiment of the imagination. Romantic artists often contrasted poetry with science, which they saw as destroying the very truth it claimed to seek.
Romanticism:
The name given to those schools of thought that value feeling and intuition over reason.
Rationalism:
The belief that human beings can arrive at truth by using reason, rather than by relying on the authority of the past, on religious faith, or on intuition.

4. From Dull Realities to Higher Truths
Romantic Escapism:
From Dull Realities to Higher Truths
Dull Reality:

5. From Dull Realities to Higher Truths
Romantic Escapism:
From Dull Realities to Higher Truths
Searched for exotic settings in the more “natural” past or in a world far removed from the grimy and noise industrial age.
Tried to reflect on the natural world until dull reality fell away to reveal underlying beauty and truth.

6. the Wilderness Experience
The American Novel and
the Wilderness Experience
American provided a sense of limitless frontiers that Europe, so long settled, simply did not possess.
The First American Hero
Virtuous
Heroic
Frontiersman
Skillful
Simply Morality
Love of Nature
Distrust of Town Life
Superhuman Resourcefulness
A True Romantic Hero

7. Some of Our Romantic Heroes
A New Kind of Hero
Eternal truths were waiting to be discovered not in dusty libraries, crowded cities, or glittering court life, but in the American wilderness that was unknown and unavailable to Europeans.
Some of Our Romantic Heroes

8. American Romantic Poetry: Read at Every Fireside
Romantic poets wanted to prove that Americans were not unsophisticated hicks.
The Fireside Poets were, in their own time and for many decades afterward, the most popular poets America had ever produced.
The Romantic poets were limited by their literary conservatism.

9. The Transcendentalists: True Reality is Spiritual
Like many Americans today, they also believed in human perfectibility, and they worked to achieve this goal.
Emerson and Transcendentalism:
The American Roots
Emerson’s Optimistic Outlook

10. The Dark Romantics
The Dark Romantics didn’t disagree with Emerson’s belief that spiritual facts lie behind the appearances of nature; they just did not think that those facts are necessarily good or harmless. Emerson, they felt, had taken the ecstatic, mystical elements of Puritan thought and ignored its dark side – its emphasis on Original Sin, its sense of innate wickedness of human beings, and its notions of predestination.

11. HOMEWORK 1-Read pages 174-175 2-Take Notes On Both Pages
3-Locate and Define the Bolded Words