A Word on Literature and Worldview

In my American Literature studies for school I have learned a lot on different worldviews and how authors worldviews affect their works, and it's really quite interesting and gives me a better appreciation and understanding of many works and the people who wrote them.  Right now the focus is coming to the time period that I love so much, the 1800's.

A picture of Washington Irving

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The Romantic movement started in the early 1800's and it emphasized the emotional, the colorful, and the imaginative.  Romanticism and the American version Transcendentalism is a worldview in which the belief is that man is basically good and as Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, one should put their faith "in man" and not "in Christ" because man was godlike.  This worldview also put an emphasis on Nature as a god and if man came closer to "Nature" than he would become a better person.

People who were apart of the Romantic literature movement were people such as Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and William Cullen Bryant, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, and many more.

Edgar Allan Poe, one of the best.

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There were many writers and poets who embraced this idea that man was inherently good and sinless and the idea of Nature.  For instance, William Cullen Bryant's poem "Thanatopsis" (which is Greek for "view of death"), you see a great deal of this idea and noted that death was simply a natural part of life.  Another example is in Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself"  in which he expressed this belief and his own:

 "I celebrate myself, and sing myself,

And what I assume you shall assume,

For every atom belonging to me as good

belongs to you."

However, there were the exceptions, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne (a Theistic who's famous novel The Scarlet Letter was a Romantic novel with a Theistic Christian worldview), and Edgar Allan Poe, who was the best poet and short story writer in the history of American literature, who rejected the idea of man being good.  Instead both Hawthorn and Poe brought out the sinful nature of man, and especially Poe who delved into the deeper and darker of man, like in his "The Tell-Tale Heart" or "The Raven".  There is an example from a poem of Poe's that I would like to share, it is the last stanza in "The Conqueror Worm" :

Out - out are the lights - out all!

And, over each quivering form,

The curtain, a funeral pall,

Comes down with the rush of a storm,

And the angels, all pallid and wan,

Uprising, unveiling, affirm

That the play is the tragedy "Man,"

And its hero the Conqueror Worm.

 One of my childhood favorites that came from the Romantic movement of literature was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (pictured below), whose poems were in my English book for third grade.  

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I love learning a reading about these authors, and on the plus side I get to do it for school.

Sincerely,

DarkAngelCase