Topic Clusters

American Literature, 1820–1865
American Renaissance and Civil War

One approach to American literature of the first half of the nineteenth century is to view it as individual responses to pervasive and difficult problems, both aesthetic and imaginative, rooted in the landscape and the polyglot population pushing across it, fighting over it, settling it, and ultimately transforming it. Along with the political and moral crisis culminating in the Civil War, many technological and social changes—the railroad, the telegraph, photography, powered presses, and a quantum leap in the availability of inexpensive books, newspapers, and journals—had enormous impact on American literary life.

The effects of these forces emerge in American hybrids of European Romanticism. For an earlier generation of farmers, settlers, and statesmen like de Crèvecoeur and Jefferson, the American wilderness was chaos, great in promise but inhuman in scale, and essentially without a past. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, inspired by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Chateaubriand, Goethe, and other European Romantics whose writings were featured in East Coast bookshops, American authors and artists began to view nature differently.

This landscape was not the Rhine or the Lake District, or a rolling countryside with picturesque ruins, and for American Romanticism this was a problem. American nature was not quaint, and it certainly was not haunted. Any ancient legends that existed about this wilderness belonged to other peoples. Unlike the landscapes favored by European Romantics, there were “no ruins in America,” as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow liked to observe about the United States he knew, none of the “grandeur, gloom, and glory” that Edgar Allan Poe imagined in the rubble of Rome to organize a setting or give it emotional weight. Romantic values and practices had to adapt to the unique look, scope, and feel of the American landscape.

The outpouring of responses to this challenge are often called the “American Renaissance,” or the “Age of Emerson.” The American Renaissance covers a period of approximately forty years, an age of unprecedented confidence and eloquence during which authors of the new republic, centered in New England and the Hudson Valley, produced poems, essays, and fiction addressing the promise and specialness of life in the new country. The Age of Emerson signifies the formidable influence after 1840 of the writings and reputation of Ralph Waldo Emerson, with which every ambitious literary artist for several decades afterward had to reckon. During this time, the American short story was invented by Hawthorne and Poe, and lyric poets such as Bryant, Whittier, Longfellow, Emerson, and Whitman achieved voices and forms expressive of a vast landscape and a diverse people. The intellectual life of the young republic began to process and reflect upon the nation's founding democratic values.

These developments grew out of a cultural imperative for new ways of thinking. Fuller, Stowe, Jacobs, and others constructed a consistent, powerful, literary presence for women. With increasing intensity and conviction, the idealists in old, established Boston neighborhoods, the Hudson River Valley, and on the prairies of Illinois confronted the moral and social disaster of race slavery. Frederick Douglass found his first audience during the early middle years of the century. The freewheeling imagination—cut loose from the confinements of consistency or the tenets of dogma—achieved dignity and, eventually, a wide audience through the adventurous prose of Herman Melville and the dauntless verse of Emily Dickinson. During this period, many conversations began—about human worth, culture, and the American natural context—that continue in the present.

General Issues and Questions

1. Consider the American variations on the churchyard elegy—a favorite mood-maker of European lyricists in the eighteenth century, and a continuing habit of European Romantic and sentimental poets and prose writers well into the nineteenth century. As an example, you might look at Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” which is easy to find in anthologies of English literature, poetry collections, or on the Web. Are there elements or echoes of the churchyard elegy (the nostalgic meditation or lament) in the works of Bryant, Longfellow, Whittier, and Emerson?
   
2. Take another look at the Thomas Cole Hudson River School paintings (see question 7 in topic 1) and compare them to the landscape paintings of George Inness, a famous New England painter of the following generation. How would you compare the ways in which the American landscape is interpreted by these artists? How domestic or “settled” do the Inness landscapes appear compared to Cole’s? How do Cole’s earlier descriptions of New England and the Hudson Valley differ from Inness’s? How is the idea of “nature” evolving in the imagination of the artist? Do you see parallel differences in how nature is conceived in the works of Bryant, Emerson, Thoreau, and Dickinson? Which of these writers’ works most resemble that of Cole? Which most resembles the work of Inness, and why?
   
3. As Transcendentalism gained favor as a philosophical, theological, and aesthetic development of the Romantic spirit, the Age of Emerson emerged as individual writers responded to Emerson’s pronouncements with varying degrees of acceptance and resistance. How do the writings of Hawthorne, Poe, Stowe, Fuller, Douglass, Melville, Whitman, and Dickinson relate to the values expressed in Emerson’s “The Poet,” “The American Scholar,” “Self-Reliance,” and “The Divinity School Address.” How would you describe each writer’s interpretation of Emerson?
   
4. Reconsider those Bradstreet poems that caught your attention. In the works of which early- and mid-nineteenth-century writers do you find echoes of her voice or outlook? If you detect a Puritan strain in the work of some of these later writers, try to explain what it is and how it persists. Consider especially Stowe, Apess, Clappe, Fuller, Dickinson, and Lazarus. In what ways do these writers situate themselves outside of the literary culture in which they participate and eloquently address? How do their works reflect and adapt values expressed by Emerson and the American Romantics? Where do you see resistance, and how might that resistance be described?