Professor Tony
American Literature
4 March 2013
Romanticism is the only literary movement exhibits a wide variety of art, literature and intellect in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This movement has been a topic of ample disagreements over its defining ideologies and aesthetics. It can best be described as a large network of sometimes competing philosophies, agendas, and points of interest. In England, Romanticism had its greatest influence from the end of the eighteenth century up through about 1870. Its primary vehicle of expression was in poetry, although novelists adopted many of the same themes. The two writers discussed in this paper will be Emily Dickinson and Edgar Allan Poe.
Romanticism was an artistic and intellectual movement originating in Europe in the late 18th century. The romantic period saw an overflowing of emotions, with “lyrical ballads” maintaining that all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling. The romantic period in American literature, which included writers like Washington Irving, Emerson, Thoreau, Emily Dickson, Edgar Allen Poe, Nathanial Hawthorne, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, and others. Romanticism is a movement in the arts that flourished in Europe and America throughout much of the 19th century from the period of the French revolution in 1789. Romantic artists’ glorified nature, idealized the past, and celebrated the divinity of creation. There is a fundamental emphasis on freedom of self-expression, sincerity, spontaneity and originality. The movement rebelled against classicism, and artists turned to sources of inspiration for subject matter and artistic style. Their treatment of subject was emotional rather than reasonable, intuitive rather than analytical. Among other Romantics, the focus on the human being was manifested in a fascination with the eerie and exotic and with the effects of guilt, evil, isolation, and terror on the human psyche. Romanticism was seen