Researched Literary Analysis
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Researched Literary Analysis
Authors of the British Romantic movement used imagery, language, and forms in ways that echoed past literary periods, particularly Renaissance and Restoration techniques, but with greater emphasis on the individual and reflection. The American Romantic Movement began shortly after that of Great Britain, transferred gradually as a transatlantic influence. The writings of various British writers like William Wordsworth deeply influenced the philosophies and writings of the American Romantics, like Walt Whitman. Although American Romanticism shares many interests with British Romanticism, the subjects and themes of American Romanticism have a different emphasis given the history of the new and growing nation. Instead of general social reform of the British Romantics, the American Romantic emphasis is on slavery and abolition as moral and social reform issues. Romantics in the United States began to form the basis for American literature, and the poets of the period are at the forefront of this new literary journey.
William Wordsworth wrote, “all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” but that “it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility” (2009, pp. 265, 273). He also writes that the poet is “a man speaking to men,” though the poet often had a greater sensitivity to the world and language than the average man; however, the poet used the language of men rather than the elevated jargon associated with 18th-century formal verse (2009, p. 269). Wordsworths manifesto from the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, a joint publication with close friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge, provides a clear statement that helps to describe the Lake School poets. The Lake School took its name and inspiration from the Lake District of northern England where these poets lived in this area and were inspired by Nature. These poets explored their relationship with the external world and often focused their reflections on a place or moment. Wordsworths manifesto requires that poetry be a reflective act rather than proceed from the impulse of a moment, and therefore earned the title of “the poet of memory.”
In shaping their poetry, American Romantics used a wide range of personas and narrative voices to distance themselves from the commentaries and ideas in their writings. The experimentation with form seen in its British counterpart is evident in American literature of the period. Romantics in the United States began to form the basis for American literature, and the poets of the period are at the forefront of this new literary journey. The transmission of Romanticism across the Atlantic Ocean, referred to as Transatlantic Romanticism, imported European and British Romantic ideals to the Americas. The Lake School poets deeply influenced the writings of American poets, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and even Walt Whitman, whose poetry and essays contemplate the connection between humanity and Nature. The meditative and personal reflective qualities of British Romanticism can be seen in nearly every American poet of the time and reflected in the continued use of lyric poetry as a dominant genre. As in British Romanticism, various philosophies and schools of thought developed in American Romanticism, such as Transcendentalism.
The poetry and writings of the transcendentalists embrace the similar uses of form, rhyme, rhythm, and meter as seen in other forms of Romanticism, both American and British. Like many of the tenets of Romantic thought and philosophy, transcendentalism can be loosely defined as “a