American Romantics - American Literature - Romantic Period

American Romantic Period - Portraits of Writers

The Romantic Period originated in Germany. Writers like Wordsworth and Coleridge are famous Romantic writers in England. In American literature, famous writers like Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, and Nathaniel Hawthorne created fiction during the Romantic Period in the United States. Explore the American fiction from the Romantic Period.

American poets like Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Edgar Allan Poe were inspired by nature, patriotism, and religion to create inspirational and experimental poetic works. Read more about American poems from the Romantic Period.

"The glory years were 1850-1855. What was it in American culture and British influences that led to the incredible flowering of masterpieces in this era: Emerson's 'Representative Men,' Hawthorne's 'The Scarlet Letter,' 'The House of Seven Gables,' Melville's 'Moby-Dick' and 'Pierre,' Thoreau's 'Walden,' and Whitman's 'Leaves of Grass.'

"Characteristics of American romanticism in the first twenty years of the 19th century: reaction against logic and reason; antiscientific in its bent; faith in something inherently good and transcendent in the human spirit in no need of salvation, but rather in need of awakening..."