The TopicThe American Renaissance was the mid-nineteenth century movement that established American literature as a
distinct way of imagining the world. It was our declaration of cultural independence from English and European
letters. It may not seem precisely accurate to refer to this mid-century movement as a re-birth, but as F. O.
Mattheissen has pointed out, that is how the writers themselves judged it: "Not as a re-birth of values that had
existed previously in America, but as America's way of producing a renaissance, by coming to its first maturity and
affirming its rightful heritage in the whole expanse of art and culture."
The writers of the American Renaissance held ideas and values in common which set them apart from the
rationalism of their 18th century predecessors on the one hand and from their more realist successors in the later
part of the 19th century on the other. During the American Renaissance, literature ceased to be chiefly didactic as it
was with Puritan divines, like Roger Williams, Cotton Mather, and Jonathan Edwards, and even with political
essayists like Paine, Jefferson, and the Federalists. Early in the 19th century Irving, Cooper, Bryant, and Poe all
turned to romantic sentiments, though they usually did so with English models in mind. Then between 1850 and
1855 there came a full romantic flowering in the poetic essays of Emerson, the romances of Hawthorne, the novels
of Melville, the transcendentalist prose of Thoreau, and the epic poetry of Whitman. These most influential writers
were joined by others like Margaret Fuller, Louisa May Alcott, and Frederick Douglass. They were all part of a
yearning for an identifiable American literature-a literature that would justify and match American political
independence. They believed in the worth and dignity of individual men and women. They disdained the harsh
God of their Puritan forebears; they were idealists, Platonists who trusted the intuitive process. They were
possessed by a moral enthusiasm for reform of both the individual and society. They presumed that the natural
world was a source of insight and human goodness. They were alienated by their country's materialism and were
themselves lovers of books and learning.
Emerson issued a clarion call for an American poet "who knew the value of our incomparable materials." He
wrote: "Our logrolling, our stumps and their politics, our fishermen, our Negroes and Indians, our boasts and our
repudiations, the wrath of rogues, and the pusillanimity of honest men, the northern trade, the southern planting,
the western clearing, Oregon and Texas, are yet unsung." It was not long before Walt Whitman made poetic lists
of such places and filled them with the talk of everyday people including the slang that gave their speech a lawless
"germinal element." He thought American poets should use words one could hear "around markets, among
fishsmackers, along the wharves that never get printed in the repertoire of any lexicon." Melville wrote of common
seamen and clothed them with "tragic graces." He knew from Hawthorne that it was possible to write great,
Shakespearean tragedy in America; indeed he boasted that Shakespeares were being "born every year along the
banks of the Ohio." Thoreau too wanted a new art for the new reality of life in America. He wanted a literature
that grew out of the American landscape. Let others travel abroad, he boasted, "I have traveled a good deal in
Concord." He said that he tried to write about these travels "as well as the farmer talks." Frederick Douglass
wrote of an American independence not yet achieved by a nation that only declared that all men were equal. He
asked: "What to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: A day that reveals to him, more than all the
other days of the year, the gross injustices and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him your celebration
is a sham." With these authors Americans began to tell stories unique to America.
Closely tied to the desire for a uniquely American literature was the romantic belief in the supreme worth of the
individual. Emerson said it was the "age of the first person singular." He taught only one doctrine, he said in Self-Reliance: "Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind." Thoreau thought, "The true reform can
be undertaken any morning before unbarring our doors. It calls no convention. I can do two-thirds the reform of
the world myself." Louisa May Alcott's young heroines were all struggling to grow more self-reliant-and none
more so than Jo Marsh, who aspires to be a writer and puts aside even marriage and family to that end.
Romantic individualism elevated men and women in an apotheosis beyond anything allowed by traditional
religious orthodoxy. The American Renaissance is properly thought of an a renaissance because it was Platonic
and idealistic; it trusted in the intuitive process of the god-possessed individual. Whitman thought Jehovah had too
low an estimate of men and women. Thoreau resigned from the church in which he was baptized and went to the
church of nature instead. Melville's sailors fought God on the infinite ocean. Frederick Douglass told Susan B.
Anthony that his prayers for freedom were never answered until he "prayed with his heels." For these writers men
and women had the souls of demigods. It is little wonder that we still read them a century and a half later.
The individualism of the American Renaissance was not without a call for social reform. Demigods perhaps, but as
Melville said, both pagans and Presbyterians alike were " badly cracked about the head and in serious need of
mending." The girls of Little Women were young pilgrims busy recording their progress in virtue. They also cared
for the poor of their neighborhood who were in need of charity. Frederick Douglass supported the emancipation of
slaves and women. Melville called Negro slavery "man's foulest crime." He said America was "intrepid,
unprincipled, reckless, predatory, with boundless ambition, civilized in externals but savage at heart." Whitman
and Hawthorne stood apart from reform. Whitman said: "I am myself just as much evil as good, and my nation
is-and I say there is no evil. Hawthorne thought reform would only bring new and unforseen evil in its train.
One of the things that made American authors reformists was the optimistic belief that nature was a great resource
for human goodness and the raw material of a moral society. Thoreau said explicitly, "In Wildness is the
preservation of the world." Louisa May Alcott's father, Bronson, said "The Concord woods were more to me than
my library, or Emerson even. They were more to him than they were to me, and still more to Thoreau than to
either of us." Walt Whitman began his great poem this way: "I loaf and invite my soul,/I lean and loaf at my ease
observing a spear of grass." It was for him a symbol of democratic equality, "growing among black folk and
among white." Hawthorne, and even more Melville, held back from the Transcendentalist's belief in the
beneficence of nature. Their complexities carried them outside romanticism on this as on other matters.
The 19th century was the century of progress, but most writers were alienated from the materialism of America.
They devoted themselves to books and ideas. Thoreau was the most persistent critic of the nation's materialism.
He said, "I have come to think a man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone." He
boasted that he needed to work only six weeks a year and then had "the whole of my winters and most of my
summers free and clear for study." Frederick Douglass' alienation from society came in slavery as did the
knowledge that freedom would come through learning to read. Literature had an almost religious value for
Melville who wrote: "It is with fiction as with religion; it should present another world, and yet one to which we
feel the tie." All of these writers shared Emerson's view: "Things are in the saddle and ride mankind."
Many Americans during the 1850s were able to date their spiritual and intellectual awakening to the time when
they read one of these author's books. The same has been true for very many American readers ever since. The
Scarlet Letter and Moby-Dick have been turning points in people's lives and marked the time when life deepened,
when sin and the tragic were taken with due seriousness. Douglass' autobiography has given people the courage to
battle racial oppression. How many hundreds of girls have determined to make something special of their lives
after reading Little Women and identifying with Jo Marsh we will never known. Nor will we ever know how many
readers of Walt Whitman embraced him and found themselves in his verses when their betters said he was merely
obscene. An equally uncounted number of Thoreau's readers still tell of reading Walden for the first time and
deciding, as a result, to live as deliberately as he did.
After the Civil War, American literature turned toward greater realism, but neither readers nor writers have
finished with the themes of this first school of distinctly American writers.
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