Another famous writer of this time was William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878), he was regarded one of the earliest naturalist poets in American history. His greatest poem Thanatopsis was published in the North American Review in 1817. He appreciates normal birds and flowers, through which appreciated harmonious relationship between human and nature. The Romantics emphasized in idualism and they thought feelings and emotions were more important than reason and common sense.
(2) The Transcendentalism
“The New England Transcendentalism was romantic idealism on puritan soil” (Wu Dingbo: 28). It stressed the power of intuition placed spirit first, and it took nature as symbolic of spirit or God. There were three main features of Transcendentalism were Unitarianism, idealistic philosophy, and oriental mysticism.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), the leader of American Transcendentalism. “He captained a group of enthusiast and formed a transcendental club with them. He also helped to set up and epted the transcendentalist journal The Dial. ” He had written many famous essays. Among the best are Nature and The American Scholar, which has been called “America’s Declaration of Intellectual Independence”. Emerson wrote in The American Scholar (1837), a man must "learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within." The main key to this inner world is the imagination. Man's imagination leads to expression. Our expression makes each of us a unique human. Romanticism became the way of thinking for this generation of writers. 作者：konishi 编辑：konishi123< id= >
Henry David Thoreau was also one of the writers of Transcendentalism, and his famous essay was Walden, in which he revealed the hidden spiritual possibilities in everyone’s life, and to considerate the pursuit of material things.
(3) High Romantics
Due to the great effort made by those geniuses such as Emerson and Thoreau, a wild-ranged national American literature had been laid a solid foundation by the mid-19th century.
There are four important names in American literature to remember from this period: Washington Irving (1783-1859), Walt Whitman (1819-1892), James Fennimore Cooper (1789-1851), and Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49).
Irving will long be remembered for his book of essays and stories, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon (1819), which helping this new nation started its first step confidently. Cooper and Whitman described the character of the nation, which combined the courage and cleverness of expansion, the great sense of destination, and the optimistic spirit together. Hawthorne and Melville expressed the dark side of American dream though their profound and symbolized works.
Walt Whitman (1819-1892), father of free verse, “he threw aside the traptional ornaments and prettiness of verse, and created his own form” (Wu Dingbo, 44). His Leaves of Grass (1855), which contains such well-known poems as I Hear America Singing, and Song of Myself, was regarded America’s first genuine epic poem. He rejected regular meter and rhyme in favor of flowing free verse and celebrated patriotic love, ragged in idualism, democracy and equality and stressed an almost mystical identification with America.
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864), due to his family background, his works always concerned with sin, morality, romance, and had complex Puritanism. His masterpiece was the novel The Scarlet Letter, and his The House of Seven Gables was also well liked. In these works he presented material on the alienation between facts and fancy, by using many symbols and setting to reveal the psychology of the character.
