Romanticism

Earth, Wind, and Fire

Nature and History in America

Romanticism’s Religious Roots

u Calvinist and Puritan origins

u Calvin: Nature as the “theater of God’s glory”

u Nature: where God communicates himself to us

u Permissible to say “nature is God,” if said with a pious mind

u Reformed Protestants

u Congregationalists, Unitarians, Presbyterians, Huguenots

u Eden

u Fascination human harmony with God and nature

u John Milton’s Paradise Lost

u Detailed description of Paradise as a wild garden

Romanticism & Civilization

u Nineteenth century material civilization

u Imperialism, industrialization, urbanization

u Romantic reaction

u Urban, educated, usually Northern and Reformed Protestant

u Turning from blighted, chaotic cities to Nature

Principles of Romanticism

u Reaction to machine-universe

u Search for mysticism

u Nature as wild, organic, source of mystery

u Effect on imagination & morals

u Not created by man, unsullied, pure

u God in nature

u Romantic poets

u William Wordsworth: “Tintern Abbey,” 1798

u William Cullen Bryant: “A Forest Hymn,” 1825

William Wordsworth,“Tintern Abbey,” 1798

And now, with gleams of half-extinguished thought,

With many recognitions dim and faint,

And somewhat of a sad perplexity,

The picture of the mind revives again:

While here I stand, not only with the sense

Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts

That in this moment there is life and food

For future years. And so I dare to hope,

Though changed, no doubt, from what I was when first

I came among these hills; when like a roe

I bounded o'er the mountains, by the sides

Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams,

Wherever nature led: more like a man

Flying from something that he dreads, than one

Who sought the thing he loved. For nature then

(The coarser pleasures of my boyish days

And their glad animal movements all gone by)

To me was all in all.—I cannot paint

What then I was. The sounding cataract

Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock,

The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,

Their colours and their forms, were then to me

An appetite; a feeling and a love,

That had no need of a remoter charm,

By thought supplied, nor any interest

Unborrowed from the eye.—

William Wordsworth,“Tintern Abbey,” 1798

                              That time is past,

And all its aching joys are now no more,

And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this

Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur; other gifts

Have followed; for such loss, I would believe,

Abundant recompense. For I have learned

To look on nature, not as in the hour

Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes

The still sad music of humanity,

Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power

To chasten and subdue.—And I have felt

A presence that disturbs me with the joy

Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime

Of something far more deeply interfused,

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

And the round ocean and the living air,

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:

A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,

And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still

A lover of the meadows and the woods

And mountains; and of all that we behold

From this green earth; of all the mighty world

Of eye, and ear,—both what they half create,

And what perceive; well pleased to recognise

In nature and the language of the sense

The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,

The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul

Of all my moral being.

Transcendentalism

u Ralph Waldo Emerson

u Nature, 1836

u Henry David Thoreau

u Walden, 1854

Romanticism in the Arts

u English critic John Ruskin: moral effect of art

u Hudson River School

u Thomas Cole, 1801-1848

u Frederic Church, 1826-1900

u Celebration of the West

u Albert Bierstadt, 1830-1902

u Thomas Moran, 1837-1926

America the Beautiful

u Sense of wonder at nature so grand

u Effect of Western paintings

u Report of naturalists & explorers

u Not like Europe

u Wild and as God made it

u See America first: rise of nature tourism

u White Mountains in Vermont

u Adirondacks in New York

u Yosemite in California, 1864, first park