American Romanticism

The Romantic movement, which originated in Germany, but quickly spread to England, France, and beyond, reached America around the year 1820, some 20 years after William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge had revolutionarized English poetry by publishing Lyrical Ballads. In America and in Europe, fresh new vision electrified artistic and intellectual circles. Yet, there was an important difference: Romanticism in America coincided with the period of national expansion and the discovery of a distinctive American voice. The solidification of a national identity and the surging idealism and passion of Romanticism nurtured the masterpieces of the American Renaissance.

Instead of carefully defining realistic characters through a wealth of detail, as most English or continental writers did, early American Romantics shaped heroic figures larger than life, burning with mythic significance. The typical protagonists of the American Romanticism are haunted, alienated individuals, characters of dark tales that in some mysterious way grow out of their deepest unconscious selves. The symbolic plots reveal hidden actions of the anguished spirit. Virtually all great American protagonists have been loners.

One reason for this fictional exploration into the hidden recesses of the soul was the absence of settled, traditional community life in America. Many English Romantic works show a poor main character rising on the economic and social ladder, perhaps, because of a good marriage, or discovery of a hidden aristocratic past, which does not challenge, but confirms the aristocratic social structure of England, which was an improbable plot for a post-revolutionary America.

In contrast, the American writer had to depend on his or her own devices. America was, in part, an unidentified, constantly moving frontier populated by immigrants speaking foreign languages and following their own ways of life. The serious American writer had to explore new native topics and to invent new forms. Instead of borrowing tested literary methods, Americans tended to invent new creative techniques and sometimes – a new genre along with them. The greatest master of literary innovation in the period of American Romanticism was Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), an American poet, short-story writer, and literary critic, whose stormy personal life and haunting poems and short stories make him one of the most famous figures in American literary history.

Poe was a southerner with a peculiar darkly metaphysical vision mixed with elements of realism, parody and burlesque. He refined the short story genre and invented detective fiction, and many of his tales prefigure the genres of science fiction, horror and fantasy so popular today.

Poe's influence on literature has been immense. His short story The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841) is considered the first modern detective story. His reviews of American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne mark him as the first significant theorist of the modern short story. His poetry and his stories of terror are among the most prototypical in modern literature. Writers as diverse as Scottish Robert Louis Stevenson, Russian Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Japanese Edogawa Rampo have used Poe's stories to launch their own fictional experiments. Poe celebration of pure forms of beauty and his opposition to the didactic (a tendency to instruct or moralize) in poetry laid a foundation for later literary movements, notably symbolism.

During his lifetime, Poe made many enemies through his challenge to moralistic limits on literature, his confrontation with the New England literary establishment, and his biting critical style. Some readers too easily identified Poe with the mentally disturbed narrators of his tales, a belief reinforced by Rufus Griswold, Poe's literary executor. Griswold wrote a malicious obituary (1849) and memoir (1850) of Poe that combined half-truths and outright falsehoods about Poe's personal habits and conduct. Griswold portrayed Poe as envious, conceited, arrogant, and bad-tempered. Griswold's portrait severely damaged Poe's reputation and delayed a serious consideration of the writer's place in American literature. But Poe's later rediscovery by the French poets Charles Baudelaire, Stephane Mallarme, and Paul Valery helped restore his reputation.

Poe’s short and tragic life was plagued by insecurity. He was born in Boston, into a family of traveling actors, was orphaned at an early age, and became a ward of John Allan, a wealthy Richmond merchant. The foster family lived in Great Britain from 1815 to 1820 before returning to Richmond. In 1826, Poe enrolled at the University of Virginia, but eventually, due to gambling debts, he was forced to withdraw. Poe's life style did not satisfy his foster family, their relationship deteriorated, and the young man was forced to enlist in the U.S. Army in 1827. During the same year, Poe published his first book titled Tamerlane and Other Poems, "By a Bostonian." While waiting for an appointment to the U.S. Military Academy, Poe published his second volume of poems, Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems (1829). Both collections show the influence of the English poet Lord Byron. In 1830, Poe entered the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., where he excelled in the study of languages, but one year later Poe's unbearable temper caused his expulsion and a complete break with his foster family. Poe suffered financial difficulties, especially after being ignored in John Allan's will.

Despite financial and career insecurity, Poe's excelled in poetry. His next collection, Poems (1831), contained two brilliant poems, To Helen and Israfel. To survive, he received help from American novelist John P. Kennedy in winning an editorial post with the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond, for which he contributed reviews, original or revised poems and stories, and two installments of his only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.

Poe produced several of his finest tales in the late 1830's, including Ligeia, The Fall of the House of Usher, and William Wilson. These and other stories were incorporated into Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1839). In 1841, Poe became an editor of Graham's Magazine, to which he contributed the first detective story, The Murders in the Rue Morgue. He won even greater recognition with The Gold Bug (1843), a prize-winning tale that appeared in Philadelphia's Dollar Newspaper. But real fame came to Poe after he published the poem The Raven (1845), part of the collection The Raven and Other Poems.

But despite his literary achievements, Poe's fame always bordered on notoriety. Early in 1845, he antagonized many people with a scathing campaign against the popular American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow for supposed plagiarisms. At a public appearance in Boston later that year, Poe admitted to being drunk, which further alienated the public. Another blow was the death of his wife, Virginia, who died of tuberculosis in 1847, after five years of illness. Poe's later years were colored by economic hardship and ill health. Despite the publication of the famous story The Cask of Amontillado (1846), a classical essay The Philosophy of Composition (1846), and part of his Marginalia, a collection of critical notes, his literary productivity declined.

In 1849, Poe became engaged to marry the widowed Sarah Elmira Royster Shelton, his boyhood sweetheart. On his way to bring Mrs. Clemm to the wedding, Poe stopped in Baltimore. On October 3, he was found semiconscious and delirious outside a tavern. The cause of his death four days later was listed as "congestion of the brain," though the precise circumstances of his death have never been fully explained.

Poe believed that strangeness was an essential ingredient of the beauty, and his writing was exotic. His stories and poems are populated with doomed, introspective aristocrats. These gloomy character never seem to work or socialize, instead they bury themselves in dark, moldering castles with hidden rooms that reveal ancient libraries, strange art works and eclectic oriental objects. The aristocrats play musical instruments or read ancient books, while they brood on tragedies, often the deaths of the loved ones. Themes of death-in-life, especially being buried alive or returning from the grave, appear in many of his works, including the Premature Burial, Ligeia, The Сask of Amontilliado and The Fall of the House of Usher. Poe’s twilight realm between life and death and his gaudy Gothic settings are not merely decorative. They reflect the overcivilized yet deathly interior of his characters’ disturbed psyches. This group of stories are horror stories, while there are also tales of reasoning which reflect Poe's fascination with mind, peculiar for American Romanticism.

Poe offered most sustained views on prose fiction. He approached the tale as a painter or a landscape architect might deal with his or her craft. He discussed the importance of "design," the reconciliation of diverse elements into a "unity of effect or impression." At the same time Poe warms against intensive use of allegory, so popular in contemporary prose of that time. According to Poe, the "proper uses" of prose fiction are served only when allegory is suggestive – that is, when it ceases to "enforce a truth" and offers an unobtrusive "under-current" of meaning, which is quite a modern perception of fiction. Poe's most famous fictional expression of the unity of effect is The Fall of the House of Usher (1839). The story is a portrait of a suffering artist isolated from the tides of life. Subtle psychological meanings can also be found in Ligeia, The Cask of Amontillado, and William Wilson. In all three tales, bizarre and frightening details and events conceal Poe's subtle probing of the warfare he observed in the human soul.

Despite rare poetic genius, Poe had a remarkably coherent, self-conscious view of poetry and of the creative process. Poe wrote The Philosophy of Composition to explain how he composed his most famous poem, The Raven. The essay opposes the romantic assumption that the poet works in a "fine frenzy" of pure inspiration. Instead, Poe wrote a carefully deliberate account of poetic creation. The essay analyzes the central role of "effect," the conscious choice of an emotional atmosphere that is more important than incident, character, and versification. Poe also offered his famous pronouncement that the death of a beautiful woman is the most poetical topic in the world. In " The Poetic Principle " (1850), Poe claimed that poetry works to achieve "an elevating excitement of the soul," an emotional state that could not be long sustained, thus claiming that a "long poem" is a contradiction in terms. Poe also believed that a poem's emotional impact was enhanced by music or "sweet sound." He thus devoted considerable attention to techniques of versification, especially in his essay The Rationale of Verse (1848). Consequently, Poe's Sonnet To Science (1829) subtly shows how beauty is destroyed by the coldness of the modern scientific intellect, while To Helen (1831) is a brilliant example of precision and balance and perhaps Poe's classic poetic statement on the idealization of women.

In all his poems, Poe chose elaborate musical and metrical effects, aspects of his verse that have been widely imitated and admired. Poe achieved an incantatory hypnotic quality of rhythm and made no rigid distinction between music and poetry, which is masterfully explicated in his musical poem Eldorado (1849).

A genius of poetry, prose, and criticism, an enigmatic personality, in his many tales and poems Poe heralded the Age of American Romanticism and established its range of topics, composition techniques, and idiom. His classical works, which are almost 200 years old now, are still thrilling, hauntingly beautiful, and frightening.

Дата добавления: 2014-01-11