Donny Wankan

Columbus to Whitman:

Romantic Trends in American History

            A study of American Romanticism is necessarily a study of history, a study that relates America as a cultural phenomenon to Europe as its source.  Considering America in terms of Romanticism offers some interesting links between American culture and history.

            Looking back to its European origins, Romanticism often expresses a mourning for the perceived spirituality of the ancient world.  From the Enlightenment through the Industrial Revolution, the tendencies of rationalism and materialism suggested a cold and uncaring view of human beings.  Furthermore, spiritual and emotional concerns hold little value in the calculative operations of science and materialism.  Whether correct or not, there was a popular assumption among Reformation and Enlightenment Europeans that the growing power of capitalism in trade and guild economics had defiled the sense of spiritual place inherent to the old feudal systems. 

            From its beginnings, Romanticism expressed a desire to regain a sense of individual and extra-material human significance.  Thinkers like Rousseau and poets like Keats and Wordsworth seem to have adopted the drive toward progress while mourning the loss of a sort of spiritual center.  The individualism of Romanticism works both ways.  It represents a regressive tendency that looks inward to a mythical core, and at the same time it separates the individual from the masses to move outward in new directions. 

            Prior (and contributing) to the Romantic period, the New World phenomenon was largely a paradox in that it contained both a drive toward individual desire and identity and a sense of a lost spiritual connection.  There seem to have been two significant forces driving the earliest European immigrations to America: an exploratory desire to branch out and lead the way to an unknown geographical truth and the theological drive to regain a sense of purity.  In fact, the Christian ideology of those early New World explorers and pilgrims encouraged exploration.  (I don't mean to imply that these two were the only forces at work in the New World movement—only that they become significant when we consider how this phenomenon helped lay the foundations of Romanticism.)

            For instance, Christopher Columbus colored his descriptions of the American lands with edenic imagery.  He says of the trees on the Carribean islands that they “never lose their foliage” and that they “seem to touch the sky.”  He says that the islands contain “birds of a thousand kinds,” an incredible variety of fruits and vegetables, honey, “marvelous pine groves,” etc. (The Norton Anthology: American Literature 26).  He took his colonial efforts as a performance of “divine will,” and therefore, despite the existence of indigenous residents on these islands, Columbus saw the New World as an empty Eden awaiting European/Christian use.   

            This edenic imagery in accounts by people like Columbus no doubt intrigued the protestant pilgrims of New England.  The possibility of open land and un-civilized nature provided a wonderful opportunity for a culture convinced that Europe's social and political infrastructures had corrupted humanity and denied the mandates of God and his scriptures.  The pioneers of early American colonialism felt that in a new and open landscape they could infuse their small social experiments with the religious ideals they saw as necessary to a god-like culture.

            The valuing of America as an un-marked natural possibility comes through clearly in Jonathan Edwards's “Personal Narrative.”  As a strict Puritan, we might assume he would mistrust the natural world as a pleasurable—and therefore guilty—distraction from divine subjects.  But to Edwards, a natural setting was ideal for the contemplation of God.  “It seemed to me,” he wrote, “[calm nature] brought an inexpressible purity, brightness, peacefulness and ravishment to the soul: and that it made the soul like a field or garden of God” (Norton 174).      Edwards also maintained one of his pilgrim predecessors' greatest concerns: that sin had corrupted the purity of Christian practice.  In his famous sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” he tells his followers that “there are many in this congregation now hearing this discourse that will actually be the subjects of this very misery [meaning God's punishment] to all eternity” (Norton 203).  In both descriptions, the individual proceeds alone to either an open-ness to God's light or a promise of infinite loss.     

            Although this fiery protestantism faded in the next century, the change was more an adjustment than a rejection.  The middle of the nineteenth century saw another crisis of conscience, this time regarding the moral problem of slavery.  By the time the Romantic movement had reached the United States, the pioneer drive and the fear of corrupted values had become intrinsic parts of our culture.  American Romanticism expressed itself in these terms when it challenged the slave system.

            We might look for Romantic tropes in slave narratives but a more practical question might be how these journalistic texts contributed to rather than borrowed from the intellectual trends of American Romanticism.  In “The Loophole of Retreat” Harriet Jacobs writes: “I had always been kindly treated, and tenderly cared for, until I came into the hands of Dr. Flint.  I had never wished for freedom till then” (Norton 818).   Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl contain some standard romantic elements, but the desire for lost comfort and the drive toward freedom in the text answer an obviously pragmatic need rather than the intellectual trends of the time. 

            The slave narratives encouraged a humanistic morality in American Romanticism.  Leading Romantic writers joined the abolitionist cause. Growing disgust with the government's sanctioning of slavery and with the materialism of the industrial revolution led thinkers like Emerson both outward (back, in a sense) to the idea of pure nature and inward to an imagined spiritual self. 

            Unlike Edwards, Emerson did not summarily deny one intellectual possibility to replace it with another.  He seemed hopeful about the mood of discovery within the industrial revolution.  In his introduction to Nature he suggested that “undoubtedly we have no questions to ask which are unanswerable” (Norton 493). 

            But Emerson sought answers in a holistically pure view of nature, not in a measure by measure scientific investigation of its distinct parts.  His transcendental philosophy hoped for an enlightenment in which, as he wrote in Nature, “The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part and particle of God” (Norton 494).  Emerson suggests that a seeker of transcendence can find a sublime truth only through opening up to the natural world.

            But as the industrial revolution moved on, and a mechanistic, scientific view of the world became more practical, writers reacted to these trends of magical nature and hyperbolic significance.  Poets like Whitman shifted the focus of poetic trope from a grand, natural divinity to more specific, immediate subject matter.  Whitman's work might reasonably be marked as a great transition in American poetry.  His long lists of natural, sexual, and mechanical details (to name just a few)  drew poetics away from the grand generalities of Romantic poets like Emerson, while still containing the sweeping grandeur within panoramic lines. 

            Like the Romantics, Whitman expressed a sense of lost inspiration in poems like “When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer.”  But he did not reject what Romanticism characterized as inhuman in the industrial revolution.  In fact, in the twenty sixth section of “Song of Myself", he gives a vividly beatific description of city streets, the railroad, and a military funeral march (Norton 1030-31) .  Rather than suggest a naturalistic and introspective escape as the transcendentalists had, Whitman draws on the growing industrial and urban American culture in his poetry.  He transforms the transcendentalist notion of nature as supreme by suggesting that nature includes human society, science, and industry as well as the woods and fields.  The persona of Whitman's poetry looks within and without, rejecting few, if any, of his experiences in his search for a clear understanding of the universe. 

            If anything, Whitman rejects the moral pedantics of previous writers.  Although he does not speak in an immoral voice, he does not speak in terms of right or wrong.  This is one way in which Whitman stands apart from other writers before and after.  I can see two ways to interpret this: either Whitman's poetic voice is amoral, having rejected the moralizing tendencies so common to other writers, or his poetry contains an innocence akin to the transparent eyeball of Emerson.  The latter analysis allows me to continue my argument of American literary tradition as expressing individual desire and spiritual loss.  I could say that Whitman's poetic persona seeks a personal fulfillment in an open-ness to all possible realities and through this is able to attain a lost, childish innocence.  But I don't think Whitman can be so easily summarized.  Such an analysis ignores his obvious support of the Union during the Civil War, as evidenced in his elegiac tribute to Lincoln.  It might be more realistic to suggest that in Whitman, the certainties of previous literary generations began to unravel and that new symbolic possibilities became conceivable.      

            Moving throughout all of these texts is the individual drive to find meaning.  I would suggest—running the risk of an over-reaching universality—that in terms of desire, emotional grandiosity, and mourning for what has been lost, Romanticism grows out of natural human tendencies.  Human desires for comfort and fulfillment seem to be universal.  Applying the tendencies of Romantic literature to pre- and post-Romantic texts can open up a number of new views on American history, by tracing the development of how these desires present themselves in changing literary traditions.