Reflection-Romantacism/ Fireside poets

The fireside poets were also known as household poets or school room poets. They were basically the first group of American poets that rivaled British poets in popularity. They were poets during the romanticism period. Their poems do not seem really romantic to me, but they are very descriptive. I found one poem that was full of descriptive words by John Greenleaf Whittier. This is an excerpt from Snow-Bound
"We watched the first red blaze appear,
Heard the sharp crackle, caught the gleam
On whitewashed wall and sagging beam,
Until the old, rude-furnished room
Burst, flower-like, into rosy bloom;
While radiant with a mimic flame
Outside the sparkling drift became,
And through the bare-boughed lilac-tree
Our own warm hearth seemed blazing free."(A Brief Guide).
They use so many descriptive words that the writers of the Rationalism period did not use. They were very different writers. The rationalism writers used reason and and facts and did not really use anything that had to do with emotion. They did not want to appeal to your emotion. I think Romanticism is very different because they use all kinds of descriptive words that completely appeal to your senses and emotions. Romanticism was a reaction do Rationalism. They had much more of a value for feeling and emotion over the reason. They started writing poetry which was like an art instead of facts and figures and examples and reason that the writers of the rational period used. It was much more imaginative compared to rationalism which was much much more scientific. They do not really like civilization it seems. The romanticism writers seem much more like they like freedom and just going with the flow and nature and all the lovely things that they wrote poetry about. They did not seem to be so fond of the facts and reason that the rationalism writers just loved so much. They linked nature together with spirituality as where in the puritan writing period that was prior to the Romanticism period where God was not linked with anything he was the only thing that even mattered. Romanticism writers found beauty in pretty much everything. Even fire was beautiful to them, but in the rationalism period it seemed that they found fault in pretty much everything instead of beauty. The common themes of Romanticism love, nature, patriotism, family, god, and religion. In rationalism there was not really any common themes. The were just using reason to argue all the thing they talked about, and even prior to the rationalism period during the puritan period the ONLY theme they wrote about basically was God. Writing has changed a lot between the three periods. Mostly just between Rationalism and Romanticism. Some Romanticism writers were much more dark. They used the romanticism writing style with all the description to describe much more odd things. One writer who's work we have read through out the years in school, was Edger Allen Poe who wrote about fears and physcological things like death and others. I like rationalism period much more than the romanticism period because the way my brain works is with reason and much less with emotion. My brain just works so much better that way.

"A Brief Guide to the Fireside Poets." Poets.org - Poetry, Poems, Bios & More. Web. 22 Nov. 2011.