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American Romanticism was a multifaceted movement in music, painting, and literature that originated
in the 18th century. Although it is notoriously impossible to define Romanticism is generally
a reaction against Rationalism and materialism.
American Romantics believe that feelings and intuition should be valued over reason.
They contemplate nature's beauty as a path to spiritual and moral development.
Youthful innocence is preferred over educated sophistication.
American Romanticism shuns the artificiality of civilization and seeks unspoiled nature.
It places faith in inner experience and the power of imagination and finds beauty and
truth in exotic locales, the supernatural realm, and the inner world of the imagination.
American Romantics see poetry as the highest expression of the imagination.
Other Romantic characteristics include an admiration for the individuated hero who has
broken from social restraints and a representation of the poet as prophet or visionary. The
characteristics of the American Romantic hero is young or possesses youthful qualities,
is innocent and pure of purpose, has a sense of honor based not on society's rules but
on some higher principle, has a knowledge of people and life based on deep intuitive
understanding not on formal learning, loves nature and avoids townlife, and our American
Romantic hero quests for some higher truth in the natural world.
A group of Romantics called Transcendentalists believed everything in the world including
human beings is a reflection of the divine soul, that physical facts of the natural world
are a doorway to the spiritual or ideal world, that people can use their intuition to behold
God's spirit revealed in nature or in their own souls, and that self-reliance and individualism
must outweigh external authority and blind conformity to custom and tradition, and lastly
that spontaneous feelings and intuition are superior to deliberate intellectualism and
rationality.
Lastly, another group of Romantics, called the Dark Romantics, explore the conflicts
between good and evil, the effects of guilt and sin, and the destructive underside of
appearances.