Romanticism

Romanticism, attitude or intellectual orientation that characterized many works

of literature, painting, music, architecture, criticism, and historiography in Western civilization
over a period from the late 18th to the mid-19th century. Romanticism can e seen as a re!ection
of the precepts of order, calm, harmony, alance, idealization, and rationality that
typified "lassicism in general and late 18th-century #eoclassicism in particular. $t was also to
some e%tent a reaction against the &nlightenment and against 18th-century rationalism and
physical materialism in general. Romanticism emphasized the individual, the su!ective, the
irrational, the imaginative, the personal, the spontaneous, the emotional, the visionary, and the
transcendental.
Romanticism proper was preceded y several related developments from the mid-18th
century on that can e termed 're-Romanticism. (mong such trends was a new appreciation of
the medieval romance, from which the Romantic movement derives its name. )he romance was
a tale or allad of chivalric adventure whose emphasis on individual heroism and on the e%otic
and the mysterious was in clear contrast to the elegant formality and artificiality of prevailing
"lassical forms of literature, such as the *rench #eoclassical tragedy or the &nglish heroic
couplet in poetry. )his new interest in relatively unsophisticated ut overtly emotional literary
e%pressions of the past was to e a dominant note in Romanticism.
Romanticism in &nglish literature egan in the 1+9,s with the pulication of the Lyrical
Ballads ofWilliam Wordsworth and -amuel )aylor "oleridge. Wordsworth.s /'reface0 to the
second edition 118,,2 of Lyrical Ballads, in which he descried poetry as /the spontaneous
overflow of powerful feelings,0 ecame the manifesto of the &nglish Romantic movement in
poetry. William 3lake was the third principal poet of the movement.s early phase in &ngland.
)he second phase of Romanticism, comprising the period from aout 18,4 to the 185,s, was
marked y a 6uickening of cultural nationalism and a new attention to national origins, as
attested y the collection and imitation of native folklore, folk allads and poetry, folk dance and
music, and even previously ignored medieval and Renaissance works. )he revived historical
appreciation was translated into imaginative writing y -ir Walter -cott, who is often considered
to have invented the historical novel. (t aout this same time &nglish Romantic poetry had
reached its zenith in the works of 7ohn 8eats, 9ord 3yron, and 'ercy 3 -helley. ( notale y-
product of the Romantic interest in the emotional were works dealing with the supernatural, the
weird, and the horrile, as in :ary -helley.s Frankenstein and works y ".R. :aturin, the
:ar6uis de -ade, and &.).(. ;offmann. 3y the 18<,s Romanticism had roadened to emrace
the literatures of almost all of &urope. $n this later, second, phase, the movement was less
universal in approach and concentrated more on e%ploring each nation.s historical and cultural
inheritance and on e%amining the passions and struggles of e%ceptional individuals. ( rief
survey of Romantic or Romantic-influenced writers would have to include )homas =e >uincey,
William ;azlitt, and the 3ront? sisters in &ngland
Historical Considerations
$t is one of the curiosities of literary history that the strongholds of the Romantic
:ovement were &ngland and @ermany, not the countries of the romance languages themselves.
)hus it is from the historians of &nglish and @erman literature that we inherit the convenient set
of terminal dates for the Romantic period, eginning in 1+98, the year of the first edition
of Lyrical Ballads y Wordsworth and "oleridge and of the composition of Hymns to the
Night y #ovalis, and ending in 185<, the year which marked the deaths of oth -ir Walter -cott
and @oethe. ;owever, as an international movement affecting all the arts, Romanticism egins at
least in the 1++,As and continues into the second half of the nineteenth century )he early
Romantic period thus coincides with what is often called the Bage of revolutionsB--including, of
course, the (merican 11++C2 and the *rench 11+892 revolutions--an age of upheavals in political,
economic, and social traditions, the age which witnessed the initial transformations of the
$ndustrial Revolution. ( revolutionary energy was also at the core of Romanticism, which 6uite
consciously set out to transform not only the theory and practice of poetry 1and all art2, ut the
very way we perceive the world. -ome of its ma!or precepts have survived into the twentieth
century and still affect our contemporary period.
Important components of Romanticism
Imagination
)he imagination was elevated to a position as the supreme faculty of the mind. )he Romantics
tended to define and to present the imagination as our ultimate BshapingB or creative power, the
appro%imate human e6uivalent of the creative powers of nature or even deity. $t is dynamic, an
active, rather than passive power, with many functions. $magination is the primary faculty for
creating all art.
Nature
B#atureB meant many things to the Romantics. (s suggested aove, it was often presented as
itself a work of art, constructed y a divine imagination, in emlematic language. *or e%ample,
throughout B-ong of :yself,B Whitman makes a practice of presenting commonplace items in
nature--Bants,B BheapAd stones,B and Bpoke-weedB--as containing divine elements, and he refers to
the BgrassB as a natural Bhieroglyphic,B Bthe handkerchief of the 9ord.B While particular
perspectives with regard to nature varied consideraly--nature as a healing power, nature as a
source of su!ect and image, nature as a refuge from the artificial constructs of civilization,
including artificial language--the prevailing views accorded nature the status of an organically
unified whole.
Symbolism and Myth
-ymolism and myth were given great prominence in the Romantic conception of art. $n the
Romantic view, symols were the human aesthetic correlatives of natureAs emlematic language.
)hey were valued too ecause they could simultaneously suggest many things, and were thus
thought superior to the one-to-one communications of allegory. 'artly, it may have een the
desire to e%press the Bine%pressileB--the infinite--through the availale resources of language
that led to symol at one level and myth 1as symolic narrative2 at another.