American Literature: Romanticism Sample Final Exam Essays 2015 final exam assignment #5. Romantic Poetry

Jonathon Anderson

The Rejection of Learning in Freneau’s “The Indian Burial Ground” and Whitman’s “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer”

          I would like first to take a look at a very specific phenomenon present in Philip Freneau’s “The Indian Burial Ground” and Walt Whitman’s “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” which I believe is symptomatic of Romanticism in general and becomes an imperative in the American Renaissance. Second, I would like briefly to consider the value of poetry to Romantic literature.

          Both of these poems concern negotiations between traditional knowledge (learning) and the unique experience of America. In fact, both poems begin by positing the initial term in their dialectic: from Freneau we have “In spite of all the learned have said,” from Whitman we get “When I heard the learn’d astronomer.”

          Freneau, writing half a century before Whitman, is more direct; we know immediately that the speaker of “The Indian Burial Ground” is setting himself up in opposition to “all the learned have said.” This should be no surprise. Byron and Percy Shelley were already on the international scene, doing their best to divest their good names of hereditary prestige by aligning themselves with promiscuous freedoms sexual, social, and intellectual and flocking to the banners of revolution with admirers in tow, all while finding time to compose brilliant poetry in the picturesque haunts of Europe. Consequently, the rejection of authority had a certain charm.

          However, where Byron and Shelley were working to slip out of the strictures of social convention without completely upsetting the finery of educated class, many Americans around the same time, like Freneau, sought to distance themselves from anything suggesting aristocratic privilege or Old World tradition. So, when Freneau sets his poem up in opposition to “all the learned have said,” he is not only repeating the party line of the Romantics, he is also declining the baggage of European history. What he turns to in its place is the alternate lore of the American continent and the new consciousness it offers:

In spite of all the learned have said,

I still my old opinion keep;

The posture, that we give the dead,

Points out the soul’s eternal sleep.

Not so the ancients of these lands –

The Indian, when from life released,

Again is seated with his friends,

And shares again the joyous feast. (97)

          Although what we see at first glance may be one more Native American – romanticizing piece to file away under curiously antiquated notions of the Noble Savage, careful attention reveals Freneau’s interest not in anthropology but in the nature of the soul. These introductory stanzas establish the contrast between the serene oblivion following life in traditional European theology and the Native Americans’ theological dynamism that Freneau goes on to examine in the remainder of the poem. This comparison begins with the aboriginal image, but goes beyond the simple us-them duality of the Northern European consciousness to contemplate the extent to which the American soul may be more similar to that of Native Americans than that of their European progenitors.

          Stanza four articulates Freneau’s counterpoint to “the soul’s eternal sleep” of Old World doctrine:

His bow, for action ready bent,

And arrows, with a head of stone,

Can only mean that life is spent,

And not the old ideas gone.

By this point we seem to be entering a metaphysical mode that reaches beyond the particulars of Europeans and Native Americans to suggest that America represents a sort of transcendence of Old World consciousness. Freneau’s agenda seems to be to try to pinpoint a fundamental shift in the New World’s experience of “the Romantic impulse, quest, or journey” (Obj. 1a, 2b). That difference, the poem suggests, is between the Old World idea of the ultimate end and goal of human striving in perpetual peace and a suspicion that in the New World there is, in fact, no terminus – only the striving. Furthermore, the poem proposes that this is not a bad thing. There is no eternal hibernation of the soul of America; mere life may be spent, but the Idea remains active, “shar[ing] again the joyous feast.”

          Reading this “joyous feast” not as ghost story, or even as paean to the imagination, but as Platonic form, as the idea of America certainly is, Freneau’s rejection of learning also makes sense as an insistence on experiencing life unmediated by inadequate traditions, customs, or conventions. W. H. Auden, echoing Turner’s “Frontier Thesis,” which in its turn amplified sentiments expressed by Crevecouer, observes on the relationship of Americans to their European counterparts, “A man who comes from a land settled for centuries to a virgin wilderness where he faces problems with which none of his traditions and habits was intended to deal cannot foresee the future but must improvise himself from day to day” (xxii).

          By the time Walt Whitman takes up this material half a century later, much of the foundational intellectual work of assembling a more or less cohesive idea of what America means for Americans is achieved. While there is a sense of Freneau searching for an adequate way to render “Americanness” in “The Indian Burial Ground,” Whitman’s “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” defines itself by its unassuming simplicity:

When I heard the learn'd astronomer;

When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;

When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;

When I, sitting, heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture room,

How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;

Till rising and gliding out, I wander'd off by myself,

In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,

Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.

          This poem is built on the same opposition between a conventional body of knowledge, or learning, and a characteristically American[1], unmediated experience. Whitman sublimates Freneau’s concern for the soul, implying a spiritual dimension in his description of the auditor’s movements as he “ris[es] and glid[es] out” to the “mystical moist night-air.” Like Freneau’s Native American spirits, Whitman’s narration contrasts a static, deathly quality of conventional knowledge (“When I, sitting … became tired and sick”) with the spiritual movement of the sublime (“rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself … and … Look’d up … at the stars.”).

          The compression of sentiment working with the practical logic of the poem’s structure makes it an excellent example of poetry’s compatibility with and advantages for Romanticism. Lyric poetry, with its characteristic elasticity of syntax and structure, has a natural compatibility with the ephemeral consciousness of the Romantic individual. Moreover, poetry is easily unencumbered of the numerous conventions of story, which is an advantage when trying to evoke moments of transcendence. A poem like “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” is able to reduce the radical magnitude of the “Romantic quest to cross physical borders or transgress social or psychological limits in order to attain or regain some transcendent goal or dream” into what Hannah Wells termed in her 2013 essay “American Poetry: Voices of Rebellion” a “microcosm.” These microcosms, when handled with imagination and skill, can efficiently communicate the substance and intensity of the sublime moment or the wonder and delight of transcendence. Or to put it another way, the special alchemy of language and idea found its purest expression for the Romantics not in the necessarily quotidian realm of prose but in the rarified form of poetry. As Freneau says, “Reason’s self shall bow the knee / To shadows and delusions here.