The Humanistic Tradition, Book 5 Romanticism, Realism, and the Nineteenth-Century World

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TJ123-8-2009 LK VWD0011 Tradition Humanistic 6th Edition W:220mm x H:292mm 175L 115 Stora Enso M/A Magenta (V)

Q How does Whitman’s poetry (and personality)

compare with that of the European romantics

(Readings 27.1 to 27.4)?

CHAPTER 27 The Romantic View of Nature 21

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I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,

I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

The last scud of day holds back for me,

It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the

shadow’d wilds, 5

It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk.

I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,

I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,

If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles. 10

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,

But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,

And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,

Missing me one place search another, 15

I stop somewhere waiting for you.

American Landscape Painting

Landscape painters in America mirrored the sentiments of
the transcendentalists by capturing what Thoreau
described as “the indescribable innocence and beneficence
of nature.” No less than the European Romantics,

American artists took clear delight in the beauty of nature

and its fleeting moods. But they also brought to their art a

nationalistic infatuation with one of their young nation’s

unique features—its unspoiled and resplendent terrain.

Mountain ranges, broad lakes and rivers, and verdant

forests are precisely and lovingly documented. It is as if

these painters felt compelled to record with photographic

precision the majesty and moral power of the American

continent and, at the same time, capture the magnitude of

its untamed wilderness. Panorama and painstaking detail

are features found in the topographic landscapes of the

Hudson River School—a group of artists who worked

chiefly in the region of upstate New York during the 1830s

and 1840s.

One of the leading figures of the Hudson River School

was the British-born Thomas Cole (1801–1848), whose

Oxbow(Figure 27.13) offers a view of the Connecticut

River near Northampton, Massachusetts. In this land-

scape, Cole achieved a dramatic mood by framing the

brightly lit hills and curving river of the distant vista with

the darker motifs of a departing thunderstorm and a blight-

ed tree.

Intrigued by America’s drive to settle the West,

the German-born Albert Bierstadt (1830–1902) made

panoramic depictions of that virginal territory. Bierstadt’s

landscape of the Rocky Mountains, which includes a

Native American encampment in the foreground, reflects

his fascination with the templelike purity of America’s vast,

rugged spaces along the Western frontier (Figure 27.14).

Figure 27.14 ALBERT BIERSTADT, The Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak, 1863. Oil on canvas, 6 ft. 1 in. 10 ft.^3 ⁄ 4 in.