English - American Romanticism and Transcendentalism

Like the Romantic ages in Europe (British, French, Italian, German, etc.), the United States also underwent a transformation of sorts during their own Romantic age. Following the Revolutionary War, the Neoclassic thinkers in power shaped American government and business, not realizing that they were also in turn slowly shifting the states into an age of rebellion, of emotion, and of nationalism. While Europe's Romantic ages began in the late 18th century (1775 and on), the era of American Romanticism did not begin until roughly 1820.

Tremendous population booms and the advancement of the boundaries of the country through the philosophy of manifest destiny created a drive for rugged individualism and an appreciation of nature that bordered on religious. These elements were also present in British Romanticism, and may have been what led poets and writers like Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to write about their characters and settings with such elegance and reverence. The advancement of science and the exploration of the unknown wilderness led authors like Nathaniel Hawthorne, Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, and Edgar Allen Poe to describe the untold mysteries of nature (and sometimes the supernatural). Entranced by the cultural advances in their fledgling nation, these authors also revered classical authors, like Italian epic poet Dante Alighieri and British playwright William Shakespeare, and dropped references from their heroes' most famous works in their own writing.