The Romantic Indian

This chapter looks at the image of the Indian that the nineteenth century inherited from Romantic writing, one that emphasized the trope of the “dying Indian” as a member of a race associated with positive connotations of bravery, loyalty, dignity, and so on. It shows how it provided an opportunity for poets to exploit their fondness for the melancholic or to explore the qualities of supposedly primitive people. The chapter then traces the shift from the way in which the Indian was seen as a vehicle of rhetorical eloquence to being a figure of pathos. How did this transition come about? The answer lies in a combination of factors. Taken together, these illustrate the interdependency of poetic traditions on either side of the Atlantic during this period and the adaptability of the idea of the dying Indian to serve a range of aesthetic, political, and emotional ends. In both Britain and the United States, there was a growing and increasingly compassionately expressed knowledge about what was happening to native peoples. Indians in North America, however numerous they might appear to those who still saw them as formidable military allies or opponents, were becoming increasingly vulnerable: not just to diseases, but to displacement.