THE DISILLUSIONMENT
American literature is the literature produced within the USA and the proceeding colonies based on a specific discussion of theatre and poetry. Before the founding of the USA, the British provinces British on the eastern coast were influenced heavily by English literature. Therefore, the literary tradition of America also consisted of part of the broader culture of the English novel. The American writing based on the early colonial days through the 1960s is divided into 14 units, which may be more or less equally crucial and very unsatisfactory length. The diversity, therefore, signifies the practical goal of providing students with a clear indication in terms of dominant character and relative vital of particular periods and authors.
Moreover, the concern of the previous does not diminish the significance of the present moment. It, therefore, implies that every book, whether fiction or poetry, may profoundly be marked by place and time of writing. Like any other work of art, literature is built by individual talent and uniqueness, whereby original talent may respond imaginatively to experience. Since writers comprise part of the society, therefore, their experiences are colored based on varying degrees by the prevailing institutions and the ideas they obtain in the community. This paper focuses on the often detailing parallel histories of American Poets by discussing the work of Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Besides, the paper argues on the notion of the poem as an object uniting poets and their respective poetic traditions, therefore, serving to illuminate their shared philosophical, political, and aesthetic concerns.
Transcendentalism: Ralph Waldo Emerson
The tradition of Puritan incorporated into American culture and literature is termed as a surprising phenomenon. The Puritans were not only the first or rather the largest group of settlers. The Dutch, Spaniards, and the French also claimed many portions of the American continent as their own. The focus, based on individual experience, pulled together the concerns of American writers in the mid-19th century and acted as a motif that runs through various primary literary texts. According to Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) wrote poems and essays remarkable not for what said or embodied, but due to their influence on others. The essence of Emerson is stated clearly in his famous essay of self-Reliance.’ The message of Emerson is both termed as derivative and original based purely on American literature. Emerson absorbed and powerfully moved by writings of English Romantics like Thomas Carlyle and Samuel Taylor. However, he employed the use of his Old World sources in articulating wisdom of a New World. In Europe, he insisted that, despite philosophers, revolutionaries, and intellectuals, the personal exist for the glory of the nation. In the United States of America, the notion existed for the glory of individuals, thus terming it as the new approach of the new way of living.
Each work of Emerson expresses some of the specific factors in terms of general perception. The essay termed as ‘The American Scholar’ of 1837, also focuses on education by describing what students in America need to become. Besides, the essay also crystalizes what Emerson recognized to be the truth of his time. Emerson illustrates further that their day of independence and long apprenticeship based on learning of other lands drew to a close. He mandated that American students must make themselves into a man thinking in terms of understanding the times and the demands of the modern world. Emerson’s work constitutes one of America’s intellectual declarations of independence. According to Emerson, the students learn through the study of nature and the world around them. The students are supposed to learn from the books and use them to inspire, to guide, but not to control and replace their ideas and thoughts. Besides, Emerson knew that drawing Americans out of their orbit depends much more on Christianity religion. In Emerson’s powerful work of ‘Divinity School Address (1838)’, Emerson goes to the heart of the matter by affirming his personal beliefs in the existence of God, while insisting that faith cannot be obtained at second hand, cannot be taught to an individual, and not inherited by someone else.
According to Emerson, every person must find their faith since faith cannot be received or inherited from our family, society, community, churches, and traditions. The perception of Emerson is that self-trust means trusting inner power, a power characterizing each individual. In ‘The Poet’ of 1844, Emerson illustrates how self-reliance results in great art. He, therefore, argues that a true poet is an individual characterized by great insight brought about by self-trust. Conversely, the real poet does not shape their ideas to fit forms that have been used by other poets. Emerson was aware that he was not himself that great poet, but his influence and power lay in his essays. He articulated early 19th-century optimism, determination, and confidence in doing things in a new manner. Many people consider Emerson’s writings to be shallow, that is almost blind to some factors of reality.
Innovative Fiction between the Two World Wars: Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway
Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway describe the generation of the 1920s as a new generation, grown-up finding God’s acts, all faith in man shaken, all wars fought. Gertrude further coined the statement that all the ages of the 1920s to be a lost generation, and also stressed by Hemingway in his writing as a motto to The Sun Also Rises. Many American writers went abroad to fight in the war, where they gained elaborate experience and learned a lot in terms of different cultures and religions. Most of the writers volunteered, whereas the majority (e.g., Hemingway and Stein) served in ambulance units or rather foreign armies. In some cases, these writers became fascinated by the war danger; therefore, it resulted in unnecessary risks and deaths. Some writers became victims of the stupidity characterized by narrow-mindless of the older establishment. After the Armistice, the future seemed hopeful to young Americans since democracy had triumph due to the decline of the great tyrannies, hence enabling young men out of uniform to bring new orders to the shuttered world.
America entered a period of a boom when consumerism and money became the chief aim. Besides, America also entered the Prohibition era with its subsequent growth in terms of gangsterism, violence, and corruption. In terms of disillusionment, young writers of America changed away from social writing and social action. Most writers stayed in Paris after the end of the war lured by culture, the cheapness of post-European wars, and the friendly atmosphere for the artists. Stein later exerted the most profound influence on younger writers that flocked to Paris. Stein evolved an experimental, marked by the 20th-century style of prose that explored possibilities of language to the later limits of intelligibility. In her works entitled Three Lives (1909) and The Making of Americans (1925), she developed techniques based on reproducing human speech in various repetitiveness and as well as simplicity of syntax. Also, Ernest Hemingway published his two collections of short stories in Paris between the years 1899-1961: Three Stories and Ten Poems (1923) constitute one of his arts. Besides, the language used by Hemingway was influenced by Stein and journalistic cables, that is, a short form of expression uses by correspondents while sending news by cables. Hemingway’s arts are marked by tense, concise, and as well pared down to essential, thus avoiding adjectives, flowery terms that triggers stereotypical emotional responses.
The path toward a renewal of the American consciousness and community
People like Hawkes, Barth, and Purdy, among others, represents a turning point from strict realism in American Fiction towards what is referred to as fabulation. Dating back to the beginning of the European novel literature represented superbly by Lawrence Sterne. As a competent student, I found this to be the tradition regarding the novel not as a less or more faithful representation of reality, but instead as an independent art form that creates its universe with its own set of rules or principles. Besides, the attitude has been strengthened by the significant developments in 20th-century psychology and psychics. After the formulation of the theory-based in relativity by Einstein, the discovery of Heisenberg based on the uncertainty principles, the universe presented by science seems to be no longer stable since it depends on the mechanics which are straightforward of cause and effect.
Allen Ginsberg is considered as an eclectic, occasionally brilliant poet who perceived himself as the spokesman and prophet of the Beat Generation. Ginsberg claims that moments of intense revelatory experience are the primary to poetry writing. Like other poets of his generation, Ginsberg experimented with various drugs to facilitate such hallucinatory experiences. Besides, the critics that were experienced throughout the 1960s exaggerated the contrast between academic poets and Beat poets. Therefore, the contemporary scene in terms of poetry was and, in fact, much more complex and diverse.