Romanticism

Much like the Homestead Acts and the Morrill Act were political reactions to rising industry, the Romanticism of the early 19th century was a cultural reaction to industrialization. 

Many of the leaders of this movement were city-dwellers, not farmers, who would renounce the moral corruption of the cities and retreat to some wilderness cabin.  Not being farmers, these men and women were unacquainted with the land, and saw civilization as the enemy of the land; effectively making Romanticism the enemy of Agrarianism.  As Henry David Thoreau said, "if it were proposed to me to dwell in the neighborhood of the most beautiful garden that ever human art contrived, or else of a dismal swamp, I should certainly decide the swamp."  One might conclude that Thoreau was not all that familiar with swamps.

Wendell Berry noted that until the Romantic poets of the 19th century, "Western scholars and poets alike had taken for granted that man was part of nature, a part and not separate from it."  Romanticism was at war with the farmer because it viewed humans as separate from the land, instead of an intricate part of it.  Humans, through their machines, were destroying the land, and the only solution was some form of escapism.  Romanticism inevitably led towards present-day environmentalism, and further away from the ancient art of husbandry.