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American Romanticism: The New World Reimagined

American Romanticism developed in the early decades of the new American republic, drawing on European Romantic sources but adapting them to the distinctive experience of the New World. The vast American landscape, the new American democracy, the experience of the frontier, the dark underside of the new republic, the distinctive American voice — all of these became central to a movement that produced some of the most original literature of the nineteenth century. The major American Romantics — Irving, Cooper, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, and the Transcendentalists — gave American writing an enduring place in the world literary tradition.

This page offers a structured introduction to American Romanticism — its origins, its major figures, its characteristic themes, and its long influence.

The Origins of American Romanticism

American Romanticism emerged in the early decades of the nineteenth century, in the period between the ratification of the Constitution (1788) and the beginning of the Civil War (1861). This period, often called the “American Renaissance” by the scholar F.O. Matthiessen, saw an extraordinary flowering of American literature and thought.

Several factors contributed to the rise of American Romanticism:

  • The new American experience — the vast landscape, the frontier, the new republican form of government, the experience of the new nation, all demanded new forms of thought and expression.
  • The influence of European Romanticism — the American writers were deeply read in English and German Romanticism, and they brought these traditions to bear on the new American material.
  • The early American political experiment — the democratic, anti-aristocratic ideals of the new republic gave American writers a distinctive political and social framework.
  • The rise of American print culture — the proliferation of newspapers, magazines, and publishing houses in the new republic created a large reading public and a market for American writing.
  • The Transcendentalist movement — the New England philosophical movement, treated in detail in our page on Transcendentalism, gave American Romanticism its philosophical and spiritual foundation.

The Major American Romantics

The major American Romantic writers include:

  • Washington Irving (1783–1859) — author of The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon (1819–20), which contains the famous stories “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” Irving was the first American writer to gain an international reputation, and his stories helped establish a distinctive American literary voice.
  • James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851) — author of the Leatherstocking Tales (1823–41), a series of novels about the frontier hero Natty Bumppo, including The Pioneers, The Last of the Mohicans, and The Deerslayer. Cooper was the first major American novelist and a major figure in the development of historical and adventure fiction.
  • Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) — poet, critic, and short-story writer, and a major figure of dark romanticism. Poe is best known for his poetry (“The Raven,” “Annabel Lee”), his tales of horror and the macabre (“The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Pit and the Pendulum”), and his invention of the modern detective story (“The Murders in the Rue Morgue”).
  • Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) — author of The Scarlet Letter (1850), The House of the Seven Gables (1851), and the great short stories collected in Mosses from an Old Manse and Twice-Told Tales. Hawthorne’s works are major expressions of American dark romanticism, exploring the dark underside of the New England Puritan past.
  • Herman Melville (1819–1891) — author of Moby-Dick (1851), Bartleby, the Scrivener (1853), and the great short stories collected in The Piazza Tales. Moby-Dick, which failed commercially during Melville’s lifetime but was rediscovered in the 1920s, is now regarded as one of the supreme American novels and one of the great works of world literature.
  • Walt Whitman (1819–1892) — author of Leaves of Grass (1855), the great American Romantic epic of the self, the body, the landscape, and the democratic ideal. Whitman’s free-verse celebration of the individual and the common people helped inaugurate modern American poetry.
  • The Transcendentalists — Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, and their circle — treated in detail in our page on Transcendentalism.

The Themes of American Romanticism

The major themes of American Romanticism include:

  • The American landscape — the vast continent, the wilderness, the frontier, the natural world as a source of spiritual renewal and national identity.
  • The dark underside of the new republic — the legacy of slavery, the treatment of Native Americans, the failures of the democratic experiment, the dark side of the American past.
  • The individual and the democratic ideal — the American conviction that the individual has a unique destiny and an inalienable right to self-expression, but also a duty to the larger community.
  • The frontier and the wilderness — the new American experience of the western frontier, the encounter with Native American cultures, the symbolic meaning of the wilderness.
  • The past and the historical imagination — the Puritan past, the Revolution, the early history of the republic, the longer history of human civilization.
  • The supernatural and the psychological — the haunted conscience, the obsession with sin, the dark visions of Poe and Hawthorne, the psychological depth of Melville.

The Long Influence of American Romanticism

The American Romantic writers have had a profound influence on later American and world literature. The American Renaissance of the 1850s, the modernism of Pound, Eliot, Stevens, Williams, and the others, the Harlem Renaissance, the post-World War II American novel, the Beat generation, the contemporary American literary scene — all draw, in different ways, on the American Romantic inheritance. The Transcendentalist conviction that the natural world is a system of meaning, the dark Romantic sense of the dark underside of the American experiment, the Whitmanian celebration of the self and the body, the Melvillian sense of the deep metaphysical and psychological reaches of human experience — these remain powerful and pervasive in American literature and thought.

Further Reading

  • F.O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (Oxford, 1941) — the founding American critical study, with a controversial thesis that has shaped the field ever since.
  • The Cambridge Companion to American Realism and Naturalism (Cambridge, 1995, ed. Donald Pizer) — for the continuation of the American tradition.
  • The Library of America editions of the major American Romantics (Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller) are the standard American scholarly editions.