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American Literature Puritanism The word Puritanism is originally used to refer the theology advocated by a party within the Church of England. The term Puritanism is also used in a broader sense to refer to attitudes and values considered characteristic of the Puritans. It has been employed to denote a rigid moralism, or the condemnation of innocent pleasure, or religious narrowness adhered by the early New England Puritans. The American Puritanism as cultural heritage exerted great influence over American moral values. And this Puritan influence over American Romanticism was conspicuously noticeable. The American Puritans accepted the doctrine of predestination, original sin and total depravity, and limited atonement through a special infusion of grace from God. Transcendentalism In New England, an intellectual movement known as transcendentalism developed as an American version of Romanticism. The movement began among an influential set of authors based in Concord, Massachusetts, and was led by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Like Romanticism, Transcendentalism rejected both 18th-century rationalism and established religion, which for the transcendentalists meant the Puritan tradition in particular. Instead, the transcendentalists celebrated the power of the human imagination to commune with the universe and transcend the limitations of the material world. The transcendentalists found their chief source of inspiration in nature. Emerson’s essay Nature(1836) was the first major document of the transcendental school and stated the ideas that were to remain central to it. Free verse Free Verse, is the rhymed or unrhymed poetry composed without attention to conventional rules of meter. Free verse is used to deliver poetry free from the restrictions of formal metrical patterns and to re-create instead the free rhythms of natural speech. Pointing to the American poet Walt Whitman as their precursor, they wrote lines of varying length and cadence节奏, usually not rhymed. Th