Essay On The Romantic Period

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Grace Berg, Courtney Crapser, Kimmy Hong English 11 Honors Mrs. Kelly Period 2 9 May 2014 Romantic Period The Romantic Period was a time when authors and poets such as Longfellow, Bryant, Irving, and Wadsworth wrote stories and poems to illustrate the American Dream in a new light of love, freedom, and adventure. The will to succeed through feelings rather than intuition was evident throughout the Romanticism period, shown by authors through such characters as the Romantic Hero; tones of achieving reflected the American Dream shared among the people through stories and experiences. During the Romantic Period, the American Dream could be characterized as the time to find success and self-realization through extreme effort, which was shown through such acts of stories and poems. People were exhausted of conforming to the social norm, in order to display their true self, they carved, wrote, and performed their beliefs into their works for everyone to see. “Romanticism, more than anything else, is the cult of the individual--the cultural and psychological nativity of the i--the self--the inner spark of divinity that links one human being to another and all human beings to the larger truth” (Romanticism 1). Romanticism could be seen as relating to the counterculture of the 1960s, those who were against the government and more about the happiness of the individual. Longfellow, Bryant, Irving, and Wadsworth were all poets during the Romantic period, along with others, they were shortly joined by a group called the Fireside Poets; these poets not only shared their stories, but shaped in the Romantic Period. They published many different stories for the people in the Romantic era to read and conforme into what they should be. A way tha... ... middle of paper ... ...ny risk in saving the damsel in distress. A damsel in distress is a young, beautiful, helpless woman that is in the need of being saved because she got herself in the wrong type of situation that she is not able to get herself out of on her own. A prime example of literature that has the Romantic hero and the damsel in distress is the movie The Last of the Mohicans, Natty Bumppo being the romantic hero and the damsel was Madeleine Stowe waiting for Natty to come and save her from the Indians that had kidnapped her. The movie allowed the viewer to get all points of view giving them the chance to see the hero and damsel in distress, letting the viewer truly get the concept of the Romantic Period. Over the years, the classic man saving the helpless woman routine, has evolved into a more feminist view where the woman saves the man, for example .

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