JE16 Into Romanticism

           During the period of American Romanticism, people valued feeling and intuition over reason. They placed faith in inner experience and the power of imagination. They also sought for unspoiled nature, preferred youthful innocence, championed individual freedom and its worth, reflected on nature’s beauty as a path to spiritual and moral development, looked backward to the wisdom of the past and distrusts progress, found beauty and truth in exotic locales, saw poetry as the highest expression of the imagination, and found inspiration in myth, legend, and folklore.

            The Transcendentalists are those who believed in the idea that in determining the ultimate reality of God, the universe, the self, and other important maters, one must transcend, or go beyond, everyday human experience in the physical world. Transcendentalism still has an impact on American today. Actually, transcendentalism is similar to idealism, which was introduced by Greek philosophers before century. Many Americans today believed in human perfectibility and they work to achieve this goal like the transcendentalists did.

            There are some dark sides of Romanticism, such as the original sin and the sense of the innate wickedness of human beings. Their views developed from mystical and the melancholy aspects of Puritan thought. They explored the conflict between good and evil, the effects of guilt and sin, and the destructive underside of appearances.