American Literature Notes: Puritans and The Age of Reason (AKA The Great

Awakening and the Rationalists’ Era)

I. Colonial Period (pre-1600 to 1760)

1. Begins with oral literature of Native Americans

2. No written literature among the more than 500 tribes before Europeans came

3. Native American stories show deep respect for nature

4. Nature contains special forces

5. Main characters may be animals or plants

6. The focus was on society more than the individual person

7. This period was God-centered for the Puritans

A. The literature of Exploration

1. The written record of Jamestown (founded 1607) is mainly that of John Smith

a. John Smith was an incurable romantic

b. He stretched the truth in his stories

c. Pocahontas is the most famous story of John Smith.

2. Later in the 1600’s, pirates, adventurers, & explorers opened the way for a second wave of settlers at Plymouth

a. Their literature consisted of diaries, journals, ships’ logs, and reports

b. Because England eventually took control of the colonies, the best known colonial literature is English.

c. Today we are “discovering” the literature of many minorities who came here at the same time.

B. The Puritans of New England (the North)

1. Puritans were probably the most intellectual colonists of any in history a. Between 1630-1690 many university graduates came to America.

b. Most educated people of that time were wealthy and not willing

to risk the wilderness life

2. Puritan writing

a. Mostly religious because they

were a “God-centered” society

b. We learn a lot about them from

their sermons

c. Puritan Themes were (1) life as a test, (2) failure leads to damnation, and

(3) success leads to heavenly bliss

d. To the Puritans, the world was an arena where God and Satan constantly fought

3. Links between Puritanism and Capitalism

a. Both rest on ambition, hard work, striving for success

b. Puritans felt earthly success was a sign that they were one of the “elect” (bound for heaven) / Today many Americans applaud material success too.

4. The Puritans believed everything that happened was “God’s will”

And I may not omite hear a spetiall worke of Gods providente. Ther was a proud and very profane yonge man, one of the sea-men, of a lustie, able body, which made him the more hauty; he would allway be contemning the poore people in their sicknes, and cursing them dayly with greevous execrations, and did not let to tell them, that he hoped to help to cast halfe of them over board before they came to their jurneys end, and to make mery with what they had; and if he were by any gently reproved, he would curse and swear rnost bitterly.

Here is a passage from William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation describing what happened to a sailor (not a Pilgrim) on the Mayflower during the passage to the New World.

But it plased God before they came halfe seas over, to smite this yong man with a greeveous disease, of which he dyed in a desperate maner, and so was him selfe the first that was throwne overbord.

5. To the Puritans, history was symbolic of them triumphing over the New World.

6. The “Separatists” (Puritans who “separated” themselves from the Old World to avoid persecution) interpreted the Bible literally. Many Americans today do the same.

7. The Puritans believed in public

education, which is why you are

sitting in this room right now!

C. The Cavaliers of the middle and southern colonies (the South)

1. Their society was aristocratic (favoring the upper class) and secular (not connected with religion)

a. Unlike the Puritans, they

supported the King of England b. They believed in education for the wealthy and upper classes only

c. Many early settlers were drawn there because of economic opportunities, not religious freedom

2. This type of society was different from the Puritan society of the North

a. Even though many were poor farmers, they believed in the Old World idea of an upper class supported by slavery

b. Wealthy southern whites did not perform manual labor

c. Puritan emphasis on hard work, education,

and earnestness was rare

d. Church was only the focus for a genteel social life, unlike the North

II. The Revolutionary Period (1760-1820)

The Revolutionary War took place in this time.

1. Military victory over England brought hope of a great new literature

2. Excellent political writings, but no great new literature came

3. American books were considered second-class in England

4. The not-yet-invented invented “American style” became a national obsession

5. Unfortunately, we were still so culturally tied to England that we simply copied the

styles being written there (art, music, writing, etc.)

6. American authors also had a small audience because many Americans were

still reading English authors

7. Lack of adequate copyright laws in America hurt – why pay an unknown

American writer for a book when you could print an unauthorized copy of a

foreign one and not get penalized? This hurt both American and English authors.

8. This period was Reason-Centered instead of God centered

A. The American Enlightenment

1. This was marked by reasoning over tradition, and scientific inquiry instead of unquestioning religious dogma

2. Writers and thinkers were devoted to justice, liberty, and equality

3. Benjamin Franklin is a good example

a. Poor Richard’s Almanack

b. The Autobiography

B. The Political Pamphlet

1. Over 2,000 pamphlets were published during the revolution

2. They thrilled patriots and threatened loyalists

3. Very dramatic; often read aloud to excite public audiences

4. American soldiers read them in camps; British loyalists burned them

5. Thomas Paine

a. Common Sense sold over 100,000 copies in first 3 months of publication

Published in 1776, Common Sense challenged the authority of the British government and the royal monarchy. The plain language that Paine used spoke to the common people of America and was the first work to openly ask for independence from Great Britain.

“IN the following pages I offer nothing more than simple facts, plain arguments, and common sense; and have no other preliminaries to settle with the reader, than that he will divest himself of prejudice and prepossession . . . .”

Common Sense came before the Revolutionary War.

B. The Crisis is a collection of articles written by Thomas Paine during the

American Revolutionary War.

b. “The Crisis” encourages colonists to fight England for freedom and contains the following famous lines:

“These are the times that try men’ssouls . . .” and “The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country . . .”

After the colonists in America decided that they were going to attempt a move towards freedom from British rule, they found themselves faced with several problems. Many of these problems dealt directly with the threat of a British invasion to stamp out such a revolution. However, a major problem was an internal one. The feelings regarding independence were mixed throughout the colonies and divided among classes. The Patriots found themselves among many devoted British loyalists who were totally against any ideas of secession.

6. Political pamphlets had to be easily understood

7. In order to have an informed electorate, the

founding fathers encouraged public education

8. One indication of a vigorous literary life in

the colonies was the large number of

newspapers

a. More newspapers read in America then than anywhere else in the world

b. Immigration required simple style in papers; clarity was important

C. Neoclassicism became popular in writing (neo = new; classicism = classics) Many American writers tried to copy the classical style; especially the epic (a long, narrative poem telling the deeds of a legendary hero) Therefore, no new “American style” in writing had yet emerged. Ironically, the first truly “American style” came in furniture design.

D. Fiction – the first important American fiction writers used American subjects,

historical perspectives, themes of change, and nostalgic tones.

1. Washington Irving took his story ideas from European folk tales

a. Legend of Sleepy Hollow

b. Rip Van Winkle

2. James Fenimore Cooper took his story ideas from America; the ironic and tragic destruction of the wilderness which had drawn us here in the first place

a. The Last of the Mohicans

b. The Leatherstocking tales where the Hero is Natty Bumppo: The Leatherstocking Tales is a series of novels by American writer James Fenimore Cooper, each featuring the main hero Natty Bumppo, known by European settlers as "Leatherstocking," 'The Pathfinder", and "the trapper" and by the Native Americans as "Deerslayer," "La Longue Carabine" and "Hawkeye".

1823 – The Pioneers, 1826 – The Last of the Mohicans,

1827 – The Prarrie, 1840 – The Pathfinder, 1841 – The Deerslayer,

III. The Romantic Period in Poetry (1820-1860)

Note: 1 through 8 is a quick overview of this section.

1. Began in Germany, then spread to France and England

2. It reached America about twenty years later

3. Because the American Romantic movement coincided with the westward movement and the discovery of a distinctive American voice in literature, it nurtured masterpieces of the American Renaissance

4. Romantic ideas centered around art as inspiration and the spiritual and aesthetic dimension of nature

5. Romantics believed that art, instead of science, could best express universal truth

6. The development of the self became a major theme (the importance of the individual over society)

7. The American Romantic poets tried to imitate the European style

Some characteristics of romanticism: love of nature; sympathetic interest in the past, especially the medieval; mysticism; individualism; emotion over reason.

8. The romantic period was emotion-centered.

A. Transcendentalism

1. Based on belief in the unity of the world and God 2. The soul of each person was thought to be identical with the world (a smaller version of it – microcosm)3. The idea of self-reliance and individualism came through the identification of the individual with God4. It was intimately connected with Concord, Massachusetts

a. Far enough from Boston to be “rural” (25 miles west) b. First rural artists’ colony c. First place to offer a spiritual and cultural alternative to American materialismd. Because they believed in individualism, they never published a manifesto (public declaration of principles and intentions)

5. Ralph Waldo Emerson

a. He was the “original” transcendentalist

b. His most famous essay is “Self-Reliance”

“Self-Reliance” contains the most solid statement of one of Emerson's repeating themes: the need for each individual to avoid conformity and follow his or her own instincts and ideas. Emerson's ideas are considered a reaction to a commercial identity; he calls for a return to individual identity.

“There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on the plot of ground which is given him to till.”

“Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your

contemporaries, the connection of events.”

“Whoso would be a man, must be a non-conformist.”

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on

the wall.”

“. . . if you would be a man speak what you think today in words as hard as cannon balls, and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said today.”

“Ah, then, exclaim the aged ladies, you shall be sure to be misunderstood! Misunderstood! It is a right fool's word. Is it so bad then to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure

and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.”

6. Henry David Thoreau

a. He was a protégé of Emerson

b. Wrote Walden

Published in 1854, it details Thoreau's sojourn in a cabin near Walden Pond, amidst woodland owned by his friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson, near Concord, Massachusetts. By living there for two years and writing about it, he hoped to isolate himself from society to gain a more objective understanding of it.

Walden emphasizes the importance of self-reliance, solitude, contemplation, and closeness to nature in transcending the "desperate" existence that, he argues, is the lot of most humans. In the first section, called “Economy,” Thoreau explains that material things are not what is important in life and that most of us spend our entire lives chasing after them and driving ourselves crazy in the process.

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

“Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.”

In the final section of Walden, entitled “Conclusion,” Thoreau sums up what he has learned in his two years at the pond.

“However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are.”

“There is an incessant influx of novelty into the world, and yet we tolerate incredible dullness.”

c. Ties between Thoreau and Hartland

John Robert Crouse, Sr., was born January 1, 1874 in Hartland, Michigan.

After graduation from the University of Michigan in 1897 he joined his father, J.B. Crouse, and his uncle, H.A. Tremaine, in a harmonious business relationship that continued for two decades.

They were then operating the Fostoria Incandescent Lamp Company in Ohio.

In 1901 they created the National Electric Lamp Association (eventually merging with General Electric) of which Nela Park in Cleveland became the headquarters.

Returning home to his boyhood roots of Hartland, Mr. Crouse set out to design his vision for a social and educational experiment for the improvement of rural life.

In 1931 Mr. Crouse conceived the plan for the Hartland Area Project.

The objective was to bring the privilege of music, drama, handicrafts, library service, health and welfare work to the residents of the rural area surrounding Hartland.

His faith in humanity and his desire for the enrichment of life has endowed the Hartland Area with the Cromaine (District) Library, the Music Hall, Waldenwoods, Community Life newspaper, and in earlier days the Hartland Area Crafts.

Community Life; PO BOX 282; Hartland, MI 48353.

7. Walt Whitman: Romantic poet

a. Poet, largely self-taught; wrote much in free verse

b. Wrote Leaves of Grass

Blank verse = no set rhyme; set rhythm

Free verse = no set rhyme; no set rhythm

It is a book of poetry originally published in 1855, then republished several times, the last edition coming out in 1891. Each time it was published more poems were added.

The voice of Walt Whitman finally became the new “American style” in poetry, although most romantic poets still followed the style of Europeans.

WHEN I heard the learn’d astronomer; 

When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me; 

When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them; 

When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in

the lecture-room, 

How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;         

Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself, 

In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, 

Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

Here is a sample poem from Leaves of Grass

B. Harvard poets

1. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow – The Song of Hiawatha

The Song of Hiawatha is an 1855 epic poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow based on the legends of the Ojibway Indians.

The Song unfolds a legend of Hiawatha and his lover, Minnehaha.

By the shores of Gitche Gumee, By the shining Big-Sea-Water, Stood the wigwam of Nokomis, Daughter of the Moon, Nokomis. Dark behind it rose the forest, Rose the black and gloomy pine-trees, Rose the firs with cones upon them; Bright before it beat the water, Beat the clear and sunny water, Beat the shining Big-Sea-Water.

Gitche Gumee is Lake SuperiorNokomis is the hero Hiawatha’s grandmother and the narrator is telling how the hero came to be.

The story begins this way:

Longfellow is popular for 3 reasons:

1. First, he had the gift of easy rhyme.

2. Second, he wrote on obvious themes

3. Third, his poems are easily understood

2. Oliver Wendell Holmes – “Old Ironsides”

He was an American physician, professor, lecturer and author.

In September of 1830, Holmes read a short article in the Boston Daily Advertiser about the renowned 18th century frigate USS Constitution, which was to be dismantled by the Navy. Holmes was moved to write "Old Ironsides" in opposition of the ship's scrapping. The patriotic poem was published in the Advertiser the very next day and was soon printed by papers in New York, Philadelphia and Washington. It not only brought the author immediate national attention, but the eight-stanza poem also generated enough public sentiment that the historic ship was preserved.

OLD IRONSIDES By Oliver Wendell Holmes September 16, 1830

Ay, tear her tattered ensign down!Long has it waved on high,And many an eye has danced to seeThat banner in the sky;

Beneath it rung the battle shout,And burst the cannon's roar;The meteor of the ocean airShall sweep the clouds no more.

Her deck, once red with heroes' blood,Where knelt the vanquished foe,When winds were hurrying o'er the flood,And waves were white below,

No more shall feel the victor's tread,Or know the conquered knee;The harpies of the shore shall pluckThe eagle of the sea!

Oh, better that her shattered bulkShould sink beneath the wave;Her thunders shook the mighty deep,And there should be her grave;

Nail to the mast her holy flag,Set every threadbare sail,And give her to the god of storms,The lightning and the gale!

C. Emily DickinsonBorn in Amherst, Massachusetts, to a successful family with strong community ties, she lived a mostly introverted and reclusive life. After she studied at the Amherst Academy for seven years in her youth, she spent a short time at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary before returning to her family's house in Amherst. Thought of as an eccentric by the locals, she became known for her penchant for white clothing and her reluctance to greet guests or, later in life, even leave her room. Most of her friendships were therefore carried out by correspondence.

Although Dickinson was a prolific private poet, fewer than a dozen of her nearly eighteen hundred poems were published during her lifetime. The work that was published during her lifetime was usually altered significantly by the publishers to fit the conventional poetic rules of the time. Dickinson's poems are unique for the era in which she wrote; they contain short lines, typically lack titles, and often use slant rhyme as well as unconventional capitalization and punctuation. Many of her poems deal with themes of death and immortality, two recurring topics in letters to her friends.

Term: slant rhyme (sometimes called off rhyme or half rhyme)

A partial or imperfect rhyme. Example: cold – worldExample in a Dickinson poem:

Hope is the thing with feathers That perches in the soul, And sings the tune without the words, And never stops at all.

Because I could not stop for Death,He kindly stopped for me;The carriage held but just ourselvesAnd Immortality.

We slowly drove, he knew no haste, And I had put awayMy labor, and my leisure too,For his civility.

We passed the school, where children stroveAt recess, in the ring;We passed the fields of gazing grain,We passed the setting sun.

We paused before a house that seemedA swelling of the ground;The roof was scarcely visible,The cornice but a mound.

Since then 'tis centuries, and yet eachFeels shorter than the dayI first surmised the horses' headsWere toward eternity.

Or rather, he passed us;The dews grew quivering and chill,For only gossamer my gown,My tippet only tulle.

gossamer fabric

tulle fabric

tippets on arms

IV. The Romantic Period – Fiction (1820-1860)

Note: 1 through 4 is a quick overview of this section.1. This was the age of the “Romance,” which was not a love story

2. Typical Romantic protagonists are haunted, alienated people

3. The typical romantic story of this period has these four characteristics:

a. The setting is in the past in a far away place

b. The story has “larger-than-life” main characters

c. The good guy wins (and often becomes a hero); the bad guy loses

d. The stories have “full-information” endings

4. The American Romantic prose writers tried to create a new American style

A. Nathaniel Hawthorne – The Scarlet Letter (also developed short story)

B. Herman Melville – Moby Dick

C. Edgar Allan Poe – Developed detective story and short story

V. The Realistic Period (1860-1900)

The realists wanted to show life as it really is. Here is an example in art.

Congratulations! You are now up to the realistic age in American literature!

(page 406 in your textbook)