(2018 midterm assignment) Model Student Midterm answers 2018 #1: Long Essays (Index)

LITR 4328 American Renaissance

Brandon Burrow

3 Oct. 2018

Reason to Romanticism: Hooked on a Feeling

The American Renaissance was a time that emphasized the imagination over the mundane realities of daily life. As Ralph Waldo Emerson says in his essay Nature, “there [was] new lands, new men, new thoughts,” and it was time for a new perspective on life and art. Following the Enlightenment, a time of rationalism, empiricism, and measured progress, the Romantic writers wanted to escape from the seriousness around them, and so their collective fancies embarked on a journey that became known as the American Renaissance.

The earliest dated story I will cover, which both responds to the Age of Reason/ Revolution and paves the way for the American Renaissance is Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle. It utilizes Romantic wilderness gothic imagery as well as the Enlightenment theme of satire, to provide commentary on the burgeoning post revolution American society. The character of Rip is described as “ready to attend to anybody’s business but his own; but as to doing family duty” and keeping his own affairs in order, “he found it impossible.” He was a romantic layabout who was more concerned in the novelty and adventure in helping his neighbors than the banal rigors of his own responsibilities. The tale can be seen as an allusion to America’s transition from rule by Great Britain to its independence. Rip is subject to his shrewish wife’s “petticoat government” which pushes him away. Irving writes that “his only alternative, to escape from the labor of the farm and clamor of his wife, was to take gun in hand and stroll away into the woods.” America/Rip no longer wishes to labor for the profits of another party, but instead chooses to strike out on their own in the Romantic fashion of heading out into the unknown woods.

Rip’s experiences on the mountain are “strange and incomprehensible” inspiring “awe and checked familiarity.” This language is characteristic of the sublime, something that is both amazing but horrifying or supernaturally charged at once. When he comes back to his town after being missing for 20 years he finds everything changed, but spookily similar. Instead of the inn displaying a picture of King George, George Washington’s picture is present. Trading one George for another is clever satire that questions how much has really changed. Rip searches for familiar faces and finds one remarkably familiar, a “precise counterpart of himself” 20 years prior, his son. Struggling to find a sense of understanding, Rip doubts “his own identity” since “everything’s changed” in this “enormous lapse of time”. Irving is commenting on how fast the world is changing at the end of the Enlightenment and how communities can barely be recognized in short spans of time. The story ends with Rip falling back into his old ways partly but also with him adjusting to the times as he “preferred making friends among the rising generation.” He becomes a piece of Romantic furniture at the inn telling fanciful tales of days past resisting the “changes of states and empires” that had “made but little impression on him.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson, unlike Rip, was not trying to blend generations and stymie the march of progress, but instead wanted a new ideology, a new gospel for a new generation, and in his mind, nature was the muse for this ideology. In his essay Nature, Emerson says, “The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood.” This is a Romantic sentiment in a couple of ways. First, the innocence and beauty of childhood was a common theme in writing of the time. New breath-taking experiences seen from the point of view of a young and unburdened perspective that focused on raw and innate beauty over materialism were popular. In addition to this, Emerson is speaking of one of the course terms, correspondence. Correspondence is when the emotions or state of someone’s inner self is reflected or informed by their outer surroundings. A cloudy day might make someone feel happy to stay home and write, while another person may be disappointed and feel down, as they are unable to go outside and enjoy pleasant weather. Being alert to correspondence in texts can help uncover meaning, foreshadowing, and symbols. I think that Emerson would suggest that in correspondence to the mechanical and soulless race for progress in the preceding age, man felt subjected to a spiritless existence and recognizing the beauty of nature was the cure for this ennui as well as the way forward to passion and true transcendent progress.

According to Emerson, both natural forms and manmade art “give us a delight in and for themselves.” There did not need to be some measurable value or increase of efficiency for something to have use. This contrasts the preceding Age of Reason which attempted to categorize things and enforce practicality. Emerson argues that, “the reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is, because man is disunited with himself. He cannot be a naturalist, until he satisfies all the demands of the spirit.” Being a scientist, or naturalist in Emersonian terms, requires a spark of inspiration that must be discovered in the warmth of nature. Man is part of a whole, and thus must endeavor to recognize what is good in every aspect (spiritually, naturally, and pragmatically) before recklessly charging ahead in the name of progress.

Emily Dickinson is a Romantic poet who follows Emerson’s mold of shaking things up and exploring new ideas. While her style was not as revolutionary as Whitman’s free verse, she had an eccentric style representative of Romanticism. In her poem “Wild Nights!”, you can see a shift from the implements of reason to the language of fancy and desire in the lines “done with the compass -- / done with the chart -- / rowing in Eden -- / Ah – the Sea! / Might I but moor – tonight -- / In thee!” Dickinson is done with the gadgetry of precise measurement that is meant to guide her, and in casting it aside has found herself in the paradise of Eden. Her romantic side has taken over and yearns to find herself secured in the lovely embrace of her subject. Her poem “I felt a funeral in my brain” can also be interpreted as an escape from the oppression of emotion present in the Enlightenment. Dickinson feels like her senses have largely been dulled and she is only able to perceive sounds as the funeral procession walks “across [her] soul” with their heavy “Boots of Lead.” A funeral is a very structured and precise affair, and in Dickinson’s imagined funeral, the mourners are trudging towards finality with boots of heavy metal, reminiscent of science as they consist of a periodic element. Her mind is being numbed by this somber gathering until a heavenly bell rings and change comes about.  Her last stanza, “And then a plank in Reason, broke, And I dropped down, and down -- / and hit a world, at every plunge, And finished knowing – then – ,” is suggestive of the shift from Enlightenment to Romanticism, the “plank in Reason” has given way to an unknown plunge into a new world where knowing is subjugated to feeling.

And by dropping far down, into the blackest black, Edgar Allan Poe, a sensational poet with elevated and musical language can be found. Poe inhabits the place where knowing reality stops, and feelings reign supreme. He blended sing-song honey sweet rhymes with vivid dark gothic imagery that was another characteristic of Romanticism. In his poem “Romance,” Poe encapsulates many of the common themes of the literary movement. In lines such as “while in the wild-wood I did lie / a child—with most knowing eye,” and “the blackness of the general heaven, / that very blackness yet doth fling / Light on the lightning’s silver wing,” he shows why he is perhaps the most Romantic author. The all-seeing eye of the child, as well as the light/dark contrast present between the darkness of Heaven and the flash of lightning which embodied the clash of expectation and reality, spiritual and earthly, reason and romance, are prime Romantic themes. Poe had a fascination with darkness that bordered on macabre, seen in lines such as “I could not love except where Death / Was mingling his with Beauty’s breath.” This sentiment is thrilling and expressive of the sublime. Poe needs the extremity of beauty tinged with the horror of Death to find love. Poe took his Romantic quest for beauty to the limits of human experience, finding it even in the depiction of death.

The writers of this period were responding to the lack of feeling that pervaded the era they were coming out of. Childish innocence, titillating and extravagant language, as well as a return to the romanticized gothic past were all tools they used to break free of reason and seek the sublime. Introspection and an examination of the rapidly changing world around them showed them how humanity corresponds to the world it lives in and how the environment effects the future that humanity builds for itself. Studying these authors is not only enjoyable, but a lesson in the value of looking at the world in new ways.