American Romanticism – Readership & Audience? Followed by more Longfellow

(image from http://www.westminster-abbey.org/library/burial/longfellow.htm)

America – still a young country at the time of the Romantics, writers faced many challenges unique to the developing social fabric of America.

Unlike Europe, they did not have the benefit of their own established line of writers, and philosophers. David Morse says, “American literature from Brockden Brown, Cooper and Poe, and passing by way of Transcendentalism to Hawthorne, Melville and Twain, is a mode of writing ever subject to anxiety, apprehension and strain…It is crippled by uncertainty as to what audience it is addressing and yet desperately wants to be heard”(2).

What sort of reading audience was present in America at the time? Morse suggests the following:

“To the majority of Americans literature was not very important. For them literature spelt diversion… There simply was no cultural space for literature. The separate spheres of religion, politics and trade were so all-engrossing yet exclusive that they seemed to map out and include every area of significant activity... Under the aegis of Washington irving literature figured as a cosy cultural inglenook for the refined and educated where gentlemen and perhaps a few gentlewomen could withdraw from the hurly-burly of American life in order to engage in a discourse that would be unfailingly benign (28)”.

Romanticism in Europe stresses a reunion between man and nature, but in the context of the American landscape, the charms of nature are in abundance. Poets do not have to go far to meet it, because they are surrounded in it. Morse argues that the typical American does not have time for literature, and that the refined gentlemen and gentlewomen make up the readership for the American Romantics. However, did the American Romantic writers really take this possibility into account? Writing was not a lucrative occupation in America at the time no matter the audience, so it is difficult to say that writing was pandered to a specific social class. I have not been able to uncover so far many cases of writers operating in agreeable living conditions solely owing to their patrons.

Longfellow’s poetry is very accessible to all audiences; he uses simple rhymes and easy language. He wrote on a variety of subjects, but notably, he incorporated European themes and writings. He has written the poems titled, “Keats”, “Shakespeare”, “Chaucer”, “Milton”, and “Nuremberg.” Although he was born an American, he acted as a gateway between countries and cultures.

“He served as a major conduit into this country for European culture, from the radical German romanticism of the 1830s through his Dante studies in the 1860s and 70’s. In turn, he represented the best of the new American culture to sympathetic Europeans” (XI, Calhoun).

Morse’s modes of “anxiety, apprehension, and strain” are present in much of Longfellow’s works, often they act as an undercurrent to the dominating sentimental themes. The following contains excerpts from his poem “A Psalm of Life” (http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/1339.html):

Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream! --
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.

Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.

Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.

In the world's broad field of battle,
In the bivouac of Life,
Be not like dumb, driven cattle!
Be a hero in the strife!

The first two stanzas provide the audience with strong, optimistic invocations of the human spirit. Like Wordsworth, he embraces and looks beyond human misery and grief. He recognizes the transitory state of the body, but embraces the flow of eternity, “Dust thou art, to dust returnest, / Was not spoken of the soul.” Yet in the third stanza, there is a shift from the positive and optimistic to a more carpe diem approach that incites action before death’s approach. The beating “muffled drums” and “Funeral marches to the grave” projects a sense of hurriedness and helplessness, as though the overwhelming presence of death is already coming to claim its subject.

Works Cited:

Calhoun, Charles C. Longfellow: A Rediscovered Life. Massachusetts, Beacon Press Books, 2004.

Morse, David. “Introduction: American and the Excessive.” American Romanticism Volume 1. London, The Macmillan Press LTD, 1987.