William Cullen Bryant And The Devil And Tom Walker

An Analysis of American Romanticism The romantic period,1735 to 1830, for writers is a dark and confusing time, it is a time when dark things are made to seem better than they are. Many great literary works come from this period, but at the price of confusing the population. People believe that â€Å"emotions and relationships were not just important, but were the very currency of life.† Three romantic era pieces stand out, The Pit and The Pendulum by Edgar Allen Poe, Thanatopsis by William Cullen Bryant and The Devil and Tom Walker By Washington Irving. These stories resemble the best qualities of the romantic era and maybe even some of the worst. Romanticism itself is a way of turning even the worst of topics into a more emotional sounding one or emphasizing a different emotion. Many romantic authors choose to write about death in a way that makes it sound like a person, so maybe it doesn’t seem as scary anymore. Others may write about war, or personal experience in a way that is not like the or iginal story. In a nutshell Romanticism is taking something and twisting it into something completely different. In The Devil and Tom Walker Irving writes about the Devil in a way that makes him seem like an eerie lumberjack or even a seedy salesman, he represents the tempter. He even skims over the fact that Walker sells his soul to the devil and focuses on the man Walker becomes after he gets what he wants from the Devil. Tom Walker is a greedy man who cared little forShow MoreRelatedAmerican Puritanism And American Romanticism1146 Words   |  5 Pagesseeking nature, and the importance of valuing feeling over reason. American Romanticist ideas were widely expressed through poetry and short stories. Literary works such as Rip Van Winkle by Washington Irving, â€Å"Thanatopsis† by William Cullen Bryant, The Devil and Tom Walker by Washington Irving, The Pit and the Pendulum by Edgar Allen Poe, The Tell Tale Heart by Edgar Allen Poe, and â€Å"The First Snowfall† by James Russell Lowell are examples of American Romanticism stories in which have a significantRead More romanticis m Essay640 Words   |  3 PagesHis most famous work is â€Å" The devil and Tom Walker† and is based on the characteristic of emphasis on imagination as a key of the human spirit. In this story Tom Walker is a greedy and miser person who makes a pact with the devil to get out of misery , so with his ambition he becomes an usurer and the devil gives him the treasure of a pirate, but Tom didn’t take care of it and at the end the devil sends him to hell because he sold his soul for money.† The devil picked Tom and away he galloped† (Irving)Read MoreThe Fire Side Poets from the Romantic Period of Literature Appreciate Nature586 Words   |  3 PagesRomantics were William Cullen Bryant and Washington Irving. Bryant wrote about his views on death and after life in the poem â€Å" Thanatopsis.† It shared a lot of my same thoughts on death and after life and really shared a story filled with emotion and feeling. â€Å"The Devil and Tom Walker† was a writing by Washington Irving, who was the inventor of the short story. This story criticized people and their greed. His message in the story to me was that its not always worth selling your soul to the â€Å"devil† in exchangeRead MoreRomantic Period of Literature in America Essay949 Words   |  4 Pagesof immigrants possessed. Another influential piece to the romantic movement puzzle was religious exploration. Authors were fascinated by the idea of the afterlife and what it entailed. This is demonstrated in a poem titled â€Å"Thanatopsis† by William Cullen Bryant. In it, he writes of a place where one is â€Å"unnoticed by the living,† and where â€Å"beauty of its innocence age cut off.† Authors began to stray away from the accepted view of death and romanticize the process. The romantic movement, like anyRead MoreSupernatural in American Fiction Essay2928 Words   |  12 Pagesmortal world. Because of this, a large following of Rices characters has developed, especially Lestat de Lioncourt. Lestat is the hypothetical author of The Vampire Lestat, The Queen of the Damned, The Tale of the Body Thief, and Memnoch the Devil.25 His fans, including Rice herself, are deeply fascinated by this tall, fair-skinned man with a mass of blond hair.26 They dream of this intriguing vampire stealing into their room with a graceful, almost feline quality to his movements,27