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Dr. Heidegger's Ride'

Decent Essays

The romantic period in American literature was kind of an interesting time. You would think that when talking about romance that all of the writing is about the author’s loved ones, but that’s not the case. The readings that were read within this class didn’t focus on a wife or husband, but rather they focused on the ideas of things. Many of the writings talked about death or the afterlife, which is not what one would expect coming from something called the romantic period. The first reading in this collection was William Cullen Bryant’s beliefs on death. He talked about how people shouldn’t be afraid of death and how it’s like going to sleep. His poem said that everyone’s going to die eventually, so we should make light of it instead of being afraid of it. The next piece of literature I read was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem call “Paul Revere’s Ride”. Longfellow wrote this poem to romanticized Paul Revere as a hero. The darker side of romanticism came from Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe. Hawthorne wrote “Dr. Heidegger's Experiment” and it was about four old people. Dr. Heidegger found the elixir of life, and he wanted to try it out on his friends. His friends become obsessed with looking young forever. It shows a darkness in human nature that we are all obsessed with being young forever. Poe wrote “The Pit …show more content…

It shows how dark we as humans can be to torture other living humans. The romantic period in American literature is a very interesting one. It is filled with different interpretations of romanticism. Usually, you would expect romantic writing to be all lovey dovey and cheesy love stories. That’s not what it was all about. People were romanticized for different reasons that didn’t have to do with just love. People were romanticized for being heros. Nature was romanticized, and so was death. Some writers focused on the darker side of romanticism. It was interesting to read about all of those

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