Henry David Thoreau was from a poor family, like Emerson, he worked his way through Harvard. Thoreau’s masterpiece, Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854), is the result of two years, two months, and two days (from 1845 to 1847) he spent living in a cabin he built at Walden Pond, near Concord. This long poetic essay challenges the reader to examine his or her life and live it authentically. Thoreau’s essay “Civil Disobedience,” with its theory of passive resistance based on the moral necessity for the just individual to disobey unjust laws, was an inspiration for Mahatma Gandhi’s Indian independence movement and Martin Luther King’s struggle for black Americans’ civil rights in the 20th century. Walt Whitman was a part-time carpenter and man of the people, whose brilliant, innovative work expressed the country’s democratic spirit. His Leaves of Grass (1855), which he rewrote and revised throughout his life, contains “Song of Myself,” the most stunningly original poem ever written by an American.The poem’s innovative, unrhymed, free-verse form, open celebration of sexuality, vibrant democratic sensibility, and extreme Romantic assertion that the poet’s self was one with the universe and the reader, permanently altered the course of American poetry. Emily Dickinson is, in a sense, a link between her era and the literary sensitivities of the 20th century. She never married, and she led an unconventional life that was outwardly uneventful but was full of inner intensity. She loved nature and found deep inspiration in the birds, animals, plants, and changing seasons of the New England countryside. Dickinson spent the latter part of her life as a recluse, due to an extremely sensitive psyche and possibly to make time for writing. Dickinson’s terse, frequently imagistic style is even more modern and innovative than Whitman’s. She sometimes shows a terrifying existential awareness. Her clean, clear, chiseled poems, rediscovered in the 1950s, are some of the most fascinating and challenging in American literature. Nathaniel Hawthorne (born Nathaniel Hathorne; July 4, 1804 – May 19, 1864) was an American novelist and short story writer. Hawthorne is best known today for his many short stories (he called them "tales") and his four major romances written between 1850 and 1860: The Scarlet Letter (1850), The House of the Seven Gables (1851), The Blithedale Romance (1852) and The Marble Faun (1860). Another novel-length romance, Fanshawe was published anonymously in 1828. Hawthorne defined a romance as being radically different from a novel by not being concerned with the possible or probable course of ordinary experience. Many of his works are inspired by Puritan New England, combining historical romance loaded with symbolism and deep psychological themes, bordering on surrealism. Hawthorne‘s works belong to romanticism or, more specifically, dark romanticism, cautionary tales that suggest that guilt, sin, and evil are the most inherent natural qualities of humanity. His later writings would also reflect his negative view of the Transcendentalism movement. Edgar Allan Poe (January 19, 1809 – October 7, 1849) was one of the most widely read and influential American writers. At the age of 18, he published his first book of poetry. In 1838 Poe published his only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon. He died in 1849. During a short life of poverty, anxiety, and fantastic tragedy, Poe achieved the establishment of a new symbolic poetry; the formalization of the new short story and the slow development of an important critical theory. Poe is best known for his poems and horror stories. Among his works are the stories The Fall of the House of Usher, William Wilson, Ligeia and The Cask of Amontillado, and the poems The Raven, Annabel Lee, Sonnet—To Science, To Helen and Israfel. The Civil War brought the Romantic Period to an end. The age of Realism came into existence. 3. The age of Realism As a literary movement, realism came in the latter half of the nineteenth century as a reaction against “the lie” of romanticism and sentimentalism. It expressed the concern for the world of experience, of the commonplace, and for the familiar and low. 1 |
