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

Lori Wheeler

Poetry and the Perpetual Dream

          As I revealed in my midterm, there is a very strong connection between the American and the Romantic.  I made the claim that an American Romance narrative provides “an honest portrayal of what happens as the American Dream…is lived out.”  Hannah Wells echoed my sentiment in her 2013 essay “Romantic Poetry: Voices of Rebellion.”  She makes the argument that American Romanticism is most accurately expressed through poetry, and it is through her argument that I continue my midterm thoughts on Romantic America and the romance narrative of the American Dream.

          Through poetry, America expresses its own dream as alive and well.  In three specific poems, Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays” and Langston Hughes’s “I Too Sing America” and “As I Grew Older,” the American Dream is a work in progress, and at the end of each poem, its promise has not been fulfilled but is expected to be achieved by future generations.  Representing African American culture as a whole, the speaker in “Older” does not expect for the dreams of African Americans to be realized when the culture is young, but expects for future generations to see the fulfillment of the culture’s dreams as it ages.  “America” speaks of the dream of being “at the table” will be satisfied tomorrow, meaning that black Americans who were denied access will see it granted to younger generations.   The “Sundays” father toils all week long, even on Sundays to secure the American Dream for his children.  The selected poems demonstrate the unending nature of the Dream as well as the Romantic hope for transcending beyond limitations.  The American Dream perpetuates the Romantic ideals by always pushing for more and setting the standard ever higher, thus making it simultaneously more difficult to achieve and more sublime when the dream is fulfilled.

          In the texts of America’s Romantic poetry, the American Dream is demonstrated through the speaker who thrives on little more than the hope that a dream guarantees. “Sundays,” “America,” and “Older” embody the Romantic journey that is the American Dream.  All three poems describe a heroic individual who is not fearful of their removal from the society of others and instead uses their isolation as motivation for achieving their dream.  The hero in each poem experiences desire and loss and seeks fulfillment and reconciliation.  The speakers characterize youth as a golden opportunity to be carefree enough to take for granted our own dreams and those of others or to prepare and strengthen for the quest ahead.  The speakers each serve as symbols, either for a culture as in Hughes’s poems or for the naïveté of childhood in Hayden’s piece.

          As much as these Romantic poems embody the American Dream in their similarities, they exemplify it in their diversity as well.  The selected poems represent two races and the shrinking divide that nonetheless still exists between each culture’s expression of the Dream.  While Hayden speaks to the experiences of the laborers of European descent, Hughes delves into the historic plight of black Americans striving for reconciliation with the life they should have had from the start.  In “America,” Hughes points to the history of slavery in America through the juxtaposition of the familiar “brother” and the exclusion from the family table.  “Older” highlights the denial of the Dream to African Americans by white institutions.  Hughes shows how that denial built over time as freed slaves began asserting their rights to the Dream.  The poem encourages African Americans of future generations to continue to fight the denial of that Dream. 

          Hayden’s “Sundays” stands in stark contrast to Hughes’s poems.  The imagery and tone of the poem suggests the workaday quality of the American Dream for white America.  The ability to work toward something better is shown as something to be taken for granted by children and be characterized as drudgery by adults.  Nevertheless, the implication at the end of the poem that the speaker now understands the plight of his father confirms that the American Dream is a repetitive cycle.  Whether the speaker’s Dream looks different than his father’s makes no difference.  The fact remains that the speaker identifies with the hard work and dedication his father employed to attain his Dream.  For that to happen, the speaker must be reaching for his own version of the American Dream.

          Specific examples have been given to demonstrate how poetry has been used in this course to show the diversity of the American Dream, which remains a constant manifestation of the country’s Romantic beginnings.  As a genre however, poetry is an accurate representation of the American Dream because of its figurative nature.  Poetry relies on symbols and metaphor to succinctly communicate grand ideas in a concentrated form of language.  In the process of compacting language to express complex themes, poetry takes what can be construed as specific and exclusive and makes it inclusive and open to interpretation.  In this way, more than any other genre, poetry romanticizes the experience of the American Dream and makes it ubiquitous by allowing the experience of the sublime to become even more so the closer a reader identifies and sympathizes with the speaker. 

Hughes, Langston. “As I Grew Older.” The Weary Blues. New York: Knopf, 1926. Print.