Read the passage.
The American Romantics v. the American Realists
There are many strong examples of the effect that history has had upon culture, and 19th-century America ranks high on that list.
At the beginning of the 1800s, the new country began to explore its vast resources. In 1803, the Louisiana Purchase added almost 830,000 square miles, nearly doubling the size of the United States. This launched a period known as the Westward Expansion as pioneers moved into new territories. By 1870, what we now refer to as the continental United States was largely settled (barring the Great Plains). It was a time of great promise and optimism. This was echoed in the works of American Romanticism and Transcendentalism. These movements include writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendall Holmes, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Emily Dickinson.
The American Romantic writers sought to differentiate themselves from their British counterparts to create a national literary identity. Romantic writers valued feeling and idealism over logic. Romanticism is the larger umbrella under which three subcategories can be found. The first of those is Transcendentalism, which adds another layer of individuality and freedom of thought. Transcendentalists encourage individual freedom of expression over the restraints of tradition and custom. The Fireside Poets were a group of writers who focused on feeling and intuition, while Dark Romantics emphasized beauty in darkness, spotlighting feelings, thought, and intuition through gothic storytelling and gloomy or sad themes.
Transcendentalists embarked on tours to areas hungry for information and learning. Emerson’s “Nature” was written for these kinds of events. In his work, he argues against materialism and advocates for finding one’s true spirituality in nature. In “Self-Reliance,” he advocates for a distinctly American point of view: conformity is to be avoided as much as possible. Meanwhile, Thoreau wrote “Civil Disobedience,” a lecture that encouraged Americans to protest governmental acts that they believed were unfair. His masterpiece, Walden, details the two years and two months he spent living alone in the wilderness. He wrote chapters dedicated to solitude, finding peace in nature, and describing the sounds of the woods.
The poetry of the time is also optimistic. Whitman self-published Leaves of Grass, a collection of twelve poems in which he celebrates American individualism. This sentiment is echoed in Dickinson’s “Some keep the Sabbath going to church—.” In this poem, she praises a personal relationship with the divine. Longfellow’s “The Children’s Hour” is a beautiful and heartfelt poem in which he describes his love for his daughters. After reading Holmes’s “Old Ironsides,” Americans demanded that the U.S.S. Constitution be salvaged from the scrap yard. The era’s idealism can even be seen in Poe’s and Melville’s darker works.
However, the celebration of the individual and focus on idealism was not favored by all writers of the 19th century. Born from the rejection of Romanticism, the American Realists aimed to represent real life in their works. Realists saw changes in society brought about by the Industrial Revolution and advances in science. Although the movement saw its beginnings in the 1830s, it reached its peak after the Civil War and continued into the early 20th century.
The works of the American Realists concentrated on fiction—especially novels. Mark Twain, Henry James, Kate Chopin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Ambrose Bierce are representative writers of the movement.
In his novels, Twain depicted everyday life through his characters and settings. By using dialects and entwining regional landmarks, such as the Mississippi River into The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Twain shared realistic life in Missouri with his readers.
Henry James did not wish to give his readers a happy ending; instead, he thought that a “good” novel represented society realistically. Many of his works focused on the theme of American innocence corrupted by European aristocratic culture.