Timothy Doherty

October 3, 2018

Diving into the Green-shine

I had a vague notion of what romanticism meant before taking this course, but I could not have given an example of romantic writing or a term associated with the movement. I was most familiar with Edgar Alan Poe, having read “The Raven” and “The Telltale Heart” in high school. Names like Whitman and Dickinson rang a bell. Ralph Waldo Emerson might have been an English poet in my mind. I’ve come a long way in a few weeks, but I’m still a child trying to shove shaped blocks through the proper holes. To enumerate every detail of this subject and all the nuanced implications of each would take a lifetime, so I will narrow the discussion to a brief overview of American romanticism and exploration of the romantic components of intensity, nature, and nostalgia.

The study of literature would be easy if it was a simple matter of memorizing dates and vocabulary words. Writers did not have a meeting in 1820 and decide that the American Renaissance had begun. Artistic movements carry the mark of their time and place. In the nineteenth century, individuals, artists and a nation came of age. The forms and themes of Romantic literature are still with us. We still idolize the rebellious individual. We consume books and movies that take us on an emotional journey. We crave intensity and the truths that nature might reveal while longing for simpler times that have passed.

The most prevalent characteristic of romantic writing is the use of language intended to intensify an emotion, character or setting beyond simple realism. Every text in the course is saturated with adjectives that are not technically necessary but serve to amplify the reader’s emotional response. For example, in The Wide, Wide World, as Ellen lies in bed on her first morning in Aunt Fortune’s house, “a great noise of hissing and sputtering came to her ears, and presently after there stole to her nostrils a steaming odor of something very savory from the kitchen.” (10.4) The passage would be technically accurate if “great,” “sputtering,” “steaming,” and “very” were removed, but it would lack the intended empathy. We are as intrigued by the sounds and smells as Ellen and cannot wait for her to take us down stairs. Poe takes intensification even further in “Ligeia.” The narrator describes the abbey to which he moved following the death of Ligeia: “The gloomy and dreary grandeur of the building, the almost savage aspect of the domain, the many melancholy and time-honored memories connected with both, had much in unison with the feelings of utter abandonment which had driven me into that remote and unsocial region of the country.” (14) In the passage Poe lets his grim description of the abbey correspond to the narrator’s “feelings of utter abandonment,” conveying his emotional state far more vividly than any literal description could accomplish. Sometimes a poetic synonym elevates a mundane moment to something beautiful. In Whitman’s “I Sing the Body Electric” a simple scene becomes something magical: “The swimmer naked in the swimming-bath, seen as he swims through the transparent green-shine, or lies with his face up and rolls silently to and fro in the heave of the water…” The whole poem is an exercise in elevating the mundane. In this case, replacing water with “transparent green-shine" uses nature’s idealized beauty to illuminate man in a kind of divine light. That power of nature to reveal higher truth is another key element of romantic literature.

By the nineteenth century, much of western Europe’s nature had been tamed. By contrast, the newly declared United States of America clung to the edge of a vast wilderness full of monsters and mystery. Naturally, the unspoiled frontier became a central pillar of emergent American literature. Washington Irving set his stories in the lush and wild backwaters of New York’s Hudson valley where he describes the Catskill mountains “swelling up to a noble height, and lording it over the surrounding country.” (Rip Van Winkle, [1]) Perhaps no writer embraced the power of nature more than Ralph Waldo Emerson in his transcendental opus, simply entitled “Nature.” In paragraph nine, Emerson takes us for a walk past “some twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape.” The aesthetic whole of nature “is the best part of these men’s farms, yet to this their warranty-deeds give no title.” In other words, the value of the natural world transcends man’s concept of financial ownership. Emerson sums up part of nature’s role in American romance in paragraph twenty-seven. “So shall we come to look at the world with new eyes. It shall answer the endless inquiry of the intellect, -What is truth?” But nature is not always a source of truth and light in romantic literature. The wilderness of the New World serves as a perfect proxy for the fetid castles and crypts of European gothic tradition.

Nostalgia within American romantic literature sometimes takes the form of archaic language and allusions to old ways. In my mind there is a strong connection between this idealization of old customs and the gothic; perhaps this is simply because Poe used archaic language and gothic imagery together so often. In Ligeia, just before the titular character dies, she recites part of the story’s epigraph – which Poe attributes to Joseph Glanvill. “Who-who knoweth the mysteries of the will with its vigor? Man doth not yield him to the angels, not unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will.” (14) Words like “knoweth” are rampant in Poe’s writing, bringing to mind ancient origins. The strangeness accentuates his dark themes and transports the reader to disquieting places in their imagination. Though Poe is the most obvious user of archaic words, he is not alone. In The Lamplighter, Maria Susanna Cummins allows her narrator to speak briefly to a sleeping Gerty, foreshadowing events to come and implying divine intervention. “Poor little, untaught, benighted soul! Who shall enlighten thee? Thou art God’s child, little one! Christ died for thee. Will he not send a man or angel to light up the darkness within, to kindle a light that shall never go out, the light that shall shine through all eternity!” (1.14)

Inside my mind a change has begun. All the stories I’ve read over the years take on new meaning as my literary vocabulary grows. The roots of familiar tropes begin to reveal themselves. The content of this course has also affected my understanding of remembered moments. Most importantly, this knowledge has begun to influence my writing. And this is only the beginning of my education in Literature.