From schmoop.com:
“American Romanticism was the first full-fledged literary movement that developed in the U.S. It was made up of a group of authors who wrote and published between about 1820 and 1860 when the U.S. was still finding its feet as a new nation.
These guys and gals were influenced by the Romantic movement that had developed back in Britain. Like the British Romantics, their work emphasized emotion, a love of nature, and imagination. You know how you feel when you see Old Faithful? Or the red rocks of Utah? Yeah. That feeling. That ohmygoshthisiscrazyandamazing feeling.”
Performance Task (DCA #2) By the end of the unit, students will write a literary analysis on a short story they have not read previously.
The Wild Honey-Suckle by Philip Freneau
Fair flower, that dost so comely grow,
Hid in this silent, dull retreat,
Untouched thy honied blossoms blow,
Unseen thy little branches greet;
…No roving foot shall crush thee here,
…No busy hand provoke a tear.
By Nature’s self in white arrayed,
She bade thee shun the vulgar eye,
And planted here the gaurdian shade,
And sent soft waters murmuring by;
…Thus quietly thy summer goes,
…Thy days declinging to repose.
Smit with those charms, that must decay,
I grieve to see your future doom;
They died–nor were those flowers more gay,
The flowers that did in Eden bloom;
…Unpitying frosts, and Autumn’s power
…Shall leave no vestige of this flower.
From morning suns and evenign dews
At first thy little being came:
If nothing once, you nothing lose,
For when you die you are the same;
…The space between, is but an hour,
…The frail duration of a flower.
The Must-Knows of American Romanticism