Romanticism

Summary
Romanticism, unlike the other "isms", isn't directly political. It is more intellectual. The term itself was coined in the 1840s, in England, but the movement had been around since the late 18th century, primarily in Literature and Arts. In England, Wordsworth,Shelley, Keats, and Byron typified Romanticism. In France, the movement was led by men like Victor Hugo, who wrote theHunchback of Notre Dame. Although it knew no national boundaries, Romanticism was especially prevalent in Germany, spearheaded by artists like Goethe and thinkers such as Hegel. The basic idea in Romanticism is that reason cannot explain everything. In reaction to the cult of rationality that was theEnlightenment, Romantics searched for deeper, often subconscious appeals. This led the Romantics to view things with a different spin than the Enlightenment thinkers. For example, the Enlightenment thinkers condemned the Middle Ages as "Dark Ages", a period of ignorance and irrationality. The Romantics, on the other hand, idealized the Middle Ages as a time of spiritual depth and adventure. Looking wistfully back to the Middle Ages, the Romantic influence led to a Gothic Revival in architecture in the 1830s. Gothic novels increased in popularity. . Mary Shelley (the wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley, published Frankenstein in 1818. Few would argue that it is the best work of the British Romantics, but it is indicative. In this story, a scientist is able to master life, animating an artificially constructed person. But this "miracle of science," far from a simple story of man mastering nature through reason, ends up having monstrous results. The French had their Romantics too, though not in the same profusion as Germany. For instance, Romantic painting is always associated with Eugene Delacroix, who prized the emotional impact of color over the representational accuracy of line and careful design. Delacroix painted historical scenes, such as "liberty Leading the People" (1830) which glorified the beautiful spectacle of revolution, perhaps construing it as part of the French national character. After 1848, Romanticism fell into decline. Commentary Romanticism can be construed as an opposite to "classicism," drawing on Rousseau's notion of the goodness of the natural.Romanticism holds that pure logic is insufficient to answer all questions. Despite a founding French influence, Romanticism was most

widespread in Germany and England, largely as a reaction to the French Enlightenment. It also was a response to French cultural domination, particularly during the Napoleonic Wars. The Romanticist emphasis on individualism and self-expression deeply impacted American thinking, especially the transcendentalism of Emerson. Instead of labeling, classifying, listing, tallying and condemning, the Romantics were relativist. That is, they looked less for ultimate, absolute truth than did Enlightenment thinkers. Romantics tended to think that everything had its own value, an "inner genius". Even in morality, the Romantics began to question the notion that there even was such a thing as absolute good and evil. Instead, each society was seen to create its own standards of morality. The movement of Romanticism encompasses several contradictory aspects: several ideas are grouped into the movement, and they do not always fit together. For instance, some Romantics utilized the ideology to argue for the overthrow of old institutions, while others used it to uphold historical institutions, claiming that tradition revealed the "inner genius" of a people. Basically, as long as romantic intellectual passion, not rationalism and strict reason, were the basic underpinning of an idea, than it can be classified as "Romantic." Interestingly, because of its geographical distribution, some historians argue that Romanticism was the secular continuation of the Protestant Reformation. Romanticism was most prominent in highly Protestant countries like Germany, England, and the United States. France, which had a significant Protestant movement but which remained Catholic-dominated, had something less of a Romantic movement. Other solidly Catholic countries were even less impacted by Romanticism. In short, Romantic poetry marked a significant departure from Neoclassical poetry both in terms of its characteristic preoccupations (the supremacy of the Imagination, nature and its relation to humans) and its style (the use, especially, of symbol and myth). Many critics, but not all (e.g Lovejoy), agree with Wellek that the Romantic shared certain basic conceptions of the poet, the object, the style, and even the function of poetry that served to unify them as a coherent group. There are other, more political objects / themes of importance in Romantic poetry. Many Romantics demonstrate a concern (inspired by the events of both the French and the Industrial Revolutions) with the underprivileged, the disenfranchised and the voiceless and not merely the high-born. The Romantics all share a revolutionary (even millennial) impulse to improve society and to facilitate social amelioration and conceive of themselves as speaking on behalf of the downtrodden in society. The most elemental and uniform aspects of human nature are especially visible in what he describes as primitive persons. Traditionally, the goal of poetry was to foster morality by appealing to the reason (something which Plato thought poetry did not do). Poetry ought to be both utile et

dulce. However, the influence of Longinus and his theory of the sublime on the Romantics in this regard is clear: poetry achieves its moral aims by inducing certain sublime emotional affects in the reader. Arguing that most men have been perverted by false refinements and artificial desires, for example, Wordsworth contends that the most important function of poetry is to foster and cultivate the sensibility, emotions and sympathies of the reader. The "end of poetry," Wordsworth writes, is to "produce excitement in coexistence with an overbalance of pleasure" in order to "rectify mens feelings, to widen their sympathies, and to produce or enlarge the capability of being excited without the application of gross and violent stimulants". As he puts it elsewhere, the poet ought to "rectify mens feelings, to give them new compositions of feeling, to render their feelings more sane, pure and permanent, in sort, more consonant to nature". The fulfilment of these aims would produce what he describes as "genuine poetry, in its nature well adapted to suit mankind permanently." Shelley makes similar claims in his equally famous "A Defence of Poetry."