Reflection: Romanticism, Tom Walker, & Rip Van Winkle

In reading The Devil and Tom Walker its easy to pull out some distinctions that make this short story pop out at the reader as a Romanticism writing style. Romanticism writing has an immense amount of detail laced through out the story. This is different from let us say, the Puritan writing style. Puritan writing style is very bland and not very detailed, which makes sense because they did not have very much to look forward to at the time, and the people of the Romanticism Period were kind of at their high. The great detail that Washington Irving put into The Devil and Tom Walker can be generalized and exhibited within this paragraph where Tom Walker is describing his house. "They lived in a forlorn looking house, that stood alone and had an air of starvation. A few straggling savin trees, emblems of sterility, grew near it; no smoke ever curled from its chimney; no traveller stopped at its door. A miserable horse, whose ribs were as articulate as the bars of a gridiron, stalked about a field where a thin carpet of moss, scarcely covering the ragged beds of pudding stone, tantalized and balked his hunger; and sometimes he would lean his head over the fence, look piteously at the passer by, and seem to petition deliverance from this land of famine"(Lombardi-Irving 1). If you can not see with this example, one tiny detail of Tom Walker's house turned into this monstrous descriptive paragraph that pretty much characterizes this story as being written in the romanticism style. There are a lot of similarities between these two stories mainly because they were written by the same person. Most writers keep the same style moving from story to story. There are a lot of deep descriptions within both of the stories. In comparison with the quotation alone, Irving is describing what nature looks like when the weather is nice. "When the weather is fair and settled, they are clothed in blue and purple, and print their bold outlines on the clear evening sky; but sometimes, when the rest of the landscape is cloudless, they will gather a hood of gray vapors about their summits, which, in the last rays of the setting sun, will glow and light up like a crown of glory"(Irving 1). The presence of nature is one thing that sets this story aside as a romanticism style of writing. Most writings that started to have the occurrence of nature within the work began to happen more and more during the Romanticism period, right after rationalism. Rip Van Winkle's story is about his life experience of how not to hold onto the past which is something that is a part of Romanticism writings. Life lessons and morals and trying to come up with explanations of who people are and why people act the way they acts is the over all jist of Romanticism writings (Watts 1). We see that Rip is learning from his experiences which pertains to the time period of writers.

Lombardi, Esther. "'The Devil and Tom Walker' Short Story." Books & Literature Classics. About.com. Web. 05 Dec. 2011. <http://classiclit.about.com/od/devilandtomwalker/a/aa_deviltomwalker.htm>.

Matthews, Washington Irving. "4. Rip Van Winkle By Washington Irving. Matthews, Brander. 1907. The Short-Story." Bartleby.com: Great Books Online -- Quotes, Poems, Novels, Classics and Hundreds More. Bartleby. Web. 05 Dec. 2011. <http://www.bartleby.com/195/4.html>.

Watts, Linda S. "'Rip Van Winkle'." Encyclopedia of American Folklore. New York: Facts On File, Inc., 2007. Bloom's Literary Reference Online. Facts On File, Inc. http://www.fofweb.com/activelink2.asp?ItemID=WE54&SID=5&iPin= EAFolk704&SingleRecord=True (accessed December 5, 2011).