Reflection: Fireside Poets

The poets and writers of the Romanticism period in American literature are definitely different in the style in which they write their stories or poems. The Puritan writers during the great awakening focused mostly on how God had done something in their lives or about how God had affected something that had happened in the world, basically no matter how bad or good it was, it was always God’s doing.

Then, when the time came closer to the American Revolutionary War, people like Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, and Patrick Henry. These new thinkers brought new religious ideas like Deism, and they also brought the writing style of Rationalism into popularity. They focused more upon rational thought and facts rather than religious explanations.

Then the Fireside Poets and their Romantic writing style came along. These poets were smart people like the writers if the Rationalism period, but they were not focused so much on facts and things about learning. They focused more on things like nature and emotions. They wrote about the values that people should have. Most of these values were ones that they took from ordinary people. Values like courage, patriotism, loving nature, working hard and respecting the various members of one’s family. These values were thought to be what people should strive to attain.

The best way, I think, to exemplify the differences between the three writing styles would be to present a situation and show what each style of writer would write about it.

The first situation that would show the differences in the writing styles would be when the United States was going to scrap out the USS Constitution for the iron in its hull. The Puritan would most likely write about how it should be destroyed because of all the lives it took in the Revolutionary War. They might say that God had told them to destroy it for some reason. The Rationalism writer would probably support the idea of scraping the war ship because it would be useful for the country if they could use the iron in the ship because the ship was no longer needed. Then there’s the Romantic writer, Oliver Wendell Holmes, who wrote about the USS Constitution. He said that it should not be scraped in his poem Old Ironsides. He talks of how it was a very good ship and it felt the knee of many “vanquished foes” (Holmes 10). He goes on to say that it would be “better that her shattered hulk should sink beneath the wave” than be scraped for her metal (Holmes 17). This shows that even though there is no more need for the ship, they should not scrap it for the metal because it was such an important war ship and that “her thunders shook the mighty deep, and there should be her grave” (Holmes 19-20). It also says that “The harpies of the shore shall pluck the eagle of the sea!” (Holmes 15-16). This both shows that poets of the Romanticism period included mythology (harpies) and that they disliked the Rationalists by calling them harpies and calling the ship an eagle.

Holmes, Oliver. Old Ironsides. Comp. Jeffrey D. Wilhelm, Ph.D. and Douglas Fisher, Ph.D. Glencoe Literature. American Literature ed. Columbus: McGraw-Hill Companies, 2009. 211. Print.