Reflection: Fireside Poets

It is somewhat (cough, cough), actually very hard to judge a romanticism style of writing with only talking about it for about forty minutes.  No Mr. Langley, I am not whining. No sir, so you cannot poke me in the eye and then collect the tears.  That is weird anyways. (Why would someone want to do that?) As you showed us your nifty little power point in class, I sat back in my seat and took in what you were saying.  At least that's what the intelligent kids do these days.  I listened and pondered at the details that you were giving the class.  And then this light bulb went off in my head.  I recognized  some of the names of the Romanticism style authors.  Like Henry David Thoreau, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, as well as Oliver Wendell Holmes.  They have some very famous quotations, and each of these well known authors have their names on my list of my favorite quotations.  "What lies behind us, and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us(Emerson)." The authors I listed above used a lot more emotion within their writing. We had just come from the rationalism period where stories were based on straight facts. Then we had the Puritan period before that which relied on he acts of God and the presence of God within their lives and their work. Like Anne Bradstreet. She got her house burned down and yet she thanked God and appreciated Him with such a great capacity even though she pretty much lost everything she had(91). Author's like Ben Franklin looked rationally at situations and did not rely on the acts of Him for explanations of happenings in daily life.  Romanticism focused on and depicted who people are by putting your gut out to the world and basically assuming why people act the way they do and do the things they do. That is why most of these people Like Emerson and Thoreau  are sometimes not always appreciated as they should be because some people may see them as hypocrites, for saying things and going against them.  But, in my opinion, we all go against our true selves at some point in time. Most of the things these Transcendentalists or Romanticists said was extremely influential far past their actual time of writing in into the future.  Their opinion or knowledge as they see it, is so great that it may cause people to not actually want to hear what they are truly saying, like Mr. Ward.  I do not know about you but Romanticism may be one of my favorite periods and styles of writing. Especially by so far.  Puritanism was boring, yet rationalism is too factual.  I think that Romanticism is probably more popular because it is more relatable.  It is human nature to rely on our emotions to guide us through what ever may be happening in our lives.  It is what we are used to, so i bet at that time, it was nice for the people to have someone that actually understood what it was like to be human.  In more relatable terms.


Bradstreet, Anne. "Upon the Burning of Our House." Comp. Jeffrey D. Wilhelm, Ph.D. and Douglas Fisher, Ph.D. Glencoe Literature. American Literature ed. Columbus: McGraw-Hill Companies, 2009. 91. Print.