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

Marichia Wyatt

Short, Sweet, and Subjective

          American Romanticism is an extremely vast subject filled with countless terms and texts which have been consistently growing since the American Renaissance.  Because it is such a large subject, sometimes it can best be illustrated through the use of something a much more condensed like poetry.  By looking closely at Edgar Allan Poe’s 1849 poem “Annabel Lee,” Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays” in 1966, and Tracy K. Smith’s “I Don’t Miss It” in 2007, we can see that Romanticism covers a broad range of styles, subjects, and time periods, and can also be connected by one prevalent theme to transcend the centuries.  The fact that each of these poems combines several literary terms to create something new, and also begin with a strong sense of nostalgia, despite being completely different in theme, tone, and time, clearly illustrates the prominence of romantic poetry as the perfect medium for a course over American Romanticism. 

Edgar Allan Poe’s “Annabel Lee” is written in the romantic era and is the perfect example of a combination of several romantic terms within a handful of stanzas.  He uses nostalgia, romantic love, desire and loss, tragedy, Gothicism, the sublime, transcendence, and the grotesque all within forty-one lines.  A prime example of this combination comes from the fourth stanza:  “The angels, not half so happy in Heaven,/ Went envying her and me;/ Yes! that was the reason (as all men know,/ In this kingdom by the sea)/ That the wind came out of the cloud, chilling/ And killing my Annabel Lee” (21-16).   The angels in this poem, which are typically associated with holiness and purity, are instead jealous murderers making Annabel’s death tragic and extremely gothic. By making a sublime entity responsible for Annabel’s demise, Poe has combined these themes and transformed the typical romantic idea of angels as sublime entities into something far more sinister.  Each element is present in the poem on a separate level, yet when they are combined they create something new; the sublime and the gothic combined in this case make grotesque angels.  However, these malevolent angels cannot keep them from loving each other which is shown through the transcendence applications involved with her death:  their love will transcend time, space, and even sublime entities as “neither the angels in heaven above,/Nor the demons down under the sea./ Can ever dissever my soul from the soul/ Of the beautiful Annabel Lee” (30-33).  Their souls will transcend the boundaries of death, and they will always be together making this poem incredibly romantic.  This theme of desire and loss is prevalent throughout romanticism, which is why Poe is one of the writers most associated with the romantic era.  By combining several romantic themes to create a fantastic world where love can transcend death, and the sublime can be transformed into gothic entities, Poe shows his reader that poetry can relate several elements in a short amount of time; poetry delivers the essentials to studying the beginning of romanticism in a few pages or less.  However, Poe is not the only author in romanticism to be able to combine several themes and transform them into something new, this trend can be traced through several other texts and time periods. 

While the romantic period may be the beginning of romanticism it was the not the end.  Moving forward one hundred years to Robert Hayden’s 1966, modernist poem “Those Winter Sundays,” we can see that there is no one style to romanticism.  Through this poem we see that romanticism can be about more than romantic love and can also focus on familial relations.  Where Poe’s poem focuses on the death of young love, Hayden’s poem focuses on a father/child relationship.  However, like Poe, Hayden’s work also combines themes with the merger of nostalgia, realism, and Gothicism through the very clever devices of alliteration and allusion in the portrayal of the speakers father:  “[He] put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,/ then with cracked hands that ached/ from labor in the weekday weather made/banked fires blaze.  No one ever thanked him” (2-5).  The use of “blueblack cold,” embodies the gothic with allusions to bruises by adding the “cracked hands that ached.”  This allusion is set off by the alliteration and the onomonopeia in the stanza, with the hard consonants causing lines two and three to crack back to back, and this cracking is continued with the k in “weekday,” “banked,” and “thanked”.  Yet, these same aching “cracked hands” also show realism that suggests the struggle of daily labor.  This mixture allows the speaker to convey several messages and themes in a few lines.  The realist aspects continue through the setting, especially in contrast to “Annabel Lee.”  Where Poe’s poem is in the romantic setting of “a kingdom by the sea,” this poem is set in the more modernist setting of a realistically cold house in the winter (2).  While there are definitely several differences between these two poems and time periods, there are also several similarities that are also applicable and traceable in the post-modern era. 

Much like the poems already mentioned, Tracy K. Smith’s post-modern poem “I Don’t Miss It” provides a combination of terms and romantic ideals. Smith blends elements of the gothic, nostalgia, romantic love, desire, loss, and transcendence through an out of body experience and leaves the reader wanting more at the end of this poem through the buildup of anticipation in memories. The setting in this poem is very different from the other two poems. While it may share the same theme of nostalgic memory in a house as Hayden’s poem, the tone of this piece is quite different as it uses romantic love instead of familial.  Yet, this is not the same inseparable romantic love of Poe’s poem either as Smith’s poem culminates in sexual desire.  Desire and loss are prevalent in the memory of “straining against the noise of traffic, music,/ Anything alive, to catch your key in the door./ And that scamper of feeling in my chest,/ As if the day, the night, wherever it is/ I am by then, has been only a whir/ Of something other than waiting” (9-14).  The speaker conveys longing throughout the poem, despite the insistence in the title that she does not “miss” the subject of the poem.  Smith’s work pairs nicely with the pieces by Poe and Hayden, especially when we look at the overwhelming nostalgic opening in all three poems.  

By beginning each poem with a twinge of nostalgia, the poems are usefully linked together in the romanticism genre even though they were written in different centuries.  Poe begins with nostalgia, and starts his poem seeped in romantic imagery: “It was many and many a year ago,/ In a kingdom by the sea” (Poe 1-2).  The beginning sets the tone for the entire poem as it is set “long ago” and about a girl that “lived with no other thought/ Than to love and be loved by me” (5-6).  Their love was perfect because it is in the past and there is no one left to refute it.  The speaker in this poem is clinging to the past so much he does not even give her up in death:  “And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side/ Of my darling- my darling- my life and my bride,/ In the sepulcher there by the sea,/ In her tomb by the sounding sea” (38-41).  While this nostalgia quickly turns grotesque by the fact that he is sleeping beside a corpse, the speaker is longing to recapture his lost love by any means available to him.  While Poe’s piece is unique from the other two in time period, the theme of nostalgia is carried through the centuries by the other two poems as well which can be seen from each poem’s opening. 

 Much like Poe, Hayden begins his poem with nostalgia: “Sundays too my father got up early” (1). By immediately placing this poem in the past as a memory, nostalgia is overwhelmingly present from the very start.  As with Poe, Hayden carries this theme throughout his poem and finishes strong with “What did I know, what did I know/ of love’s austere and lonely offices?” (13-4).  The ending suggests a sense of remorse; the speaker did not understand his father when he was a child.  This interpretation of the ending may delude the Gothicism in the body of the poem for some, yet I think that it simply adds another layer to a complex memory.  The beauty of poetry lies in its subjectivity.  While some may interpret this poem as gothic, others will see it as a nostalgic memory of childhood tinged with sadness and regret.  This same subjectivity is also prevalent in “I Don’t Miss It,” where the nostalgia is convoluted by sexual desire.

  Smith also begins her poem with nostalgia:  “But sometime I forget where I am,/ Imagine myself inside that life again” (Hayden 1, Smith 1-2).  The speaker does not miss the person she is speaking about according to the title, but the nostalgia that creeps through the poem questions whether or not she sometimes does as the memory builds on the little things until the ending where she states “It’s impossible not to want/ To walk into the next room and let you/ Run your hands down the side of my legs/ Knowing perfectly well what they know” (19-22).  Perhaps it was simply the sexual aspects the speaker is nostalgic for, yet the rest of the poem seems to suggest that she misses the little things too.  By the end of the poem, the reader is unsure whether the speaker is nostalgic about the person or their sex life, making the reading subjective for each individual reader.  Through these three very different poems we can clearly see that while some romantic elements may have evolved over the years, nostalgia seems to be consistent within each generation. 

By looking closely at the application of romantic themes in three different time periods, and three very different styles, it is easy to understand why American poetry is an important part to the genre of romanticism.  Due to the lack of time and length of poetry, the poetry is inherently vague and subjective, and each line must make a distinct impression through allusion, alliteration, or grotesque details.  Poetry has the ability to transcend time and space, and the subjectivity involved allows the reader to become part of the reading even if it was written hundreds of years before.  The fact that all three poems are so different, and were written so far apart, yet are so similar in the theme of nostalgia and the combination of several romantic terms, shows us that romantic poetry is an undeniable asset to the instruction of Romanticism as a subject that is not limited to one style, subject, or time period.