American Literature before the Civil War

Jarrod Butler
David Becker
LITR220 A003 Win 12 American Literature before the Civil War
March 3, 2012
The Importance of Nature, Emotions, the Individual, and the Supernatural to the Romantic author
It is important to know that the happenings in life don’t just happen but are triggered by certain factors. Just like all eras the romantic era came to be thanks to a few players who are called the romantics i.e. the romantic authors. The romantic era started at around 1780 to around the 1830s with the pioneers being the likes of Blake, Byron, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley and Wordsworth (Chantler and Higgins 113 and 117).
When one hears of the term romantics one is quick to jump to the conclusion that the work has a relation to love. This may not be wrong but the in the historical context romantics is an international artistic and philosophical movement that redefined the fundamental ways in which people in Western cultures thought about themselves and about their world (Romantics, para1). From this we see that the romantic’s era was brought by the need of romantics to change their environment to that, which suited them. They wanted to use this era as way of coming from their oppressed being to that of which frees them to be able to express their thoughts and emotions as they saw fit. The thesis will explain how freedom felt by the authors with the help of nature, emotion; the individual and the supernatural affected the romantic authors
The four factors that affect the romantic author are Nature, Emotion, the Individual and the Supernatural. Nature in this context might be seen as that surrounding of the author. Man and nature are one and for survival man needs nature and for nature to exist it needs man. For man to exist he needed to understand his origin and know how his environment supports his existence. The romantic writer through his works explains to man how his nature helps one to not only to understand but also define to him.
In the romantic era it is seen that this kind of writing was adopted by the scientific romantic writers some who come from Germany with the likes of Esschenmayer, Ritter, Troxler, Kerner, Trevirans, Gorres, Schubert, Steffans, Kieser, Goethe and Hegel (Porter and Teich 111).Steffen shows her thoughts about nature. She suggests that if a person wants to know nature, then they should take a look at themselves. It is only after examining a person’s gradual intellect enlightenment can the privilege of experiencing nature’s development makes sense. (Porter and Teich 112).
Emotions are one’s persona...