Romanticism was a literary and artistic movement between 1770-1870 that valued emotion, nature, imagination, and the individual. Key aspects included emphasizing feelings over reason, seeing nature as a divine work of art, using symbolism and myth, and focusing on the passions of both artists and romantic heroes who strive for the extraordinary. Romanticism criticized rigid social norms and industrialization, instead promoting intuition and a close connection between humans and the natural world.
2. Beginning and End
• Inclusive of work between 1770-1870: this
permits work by Blake and Burns as well as the
influence of Rousseau’s writings
• “Officially” starts in 1798 when Wordsworth and
Coleridge published Lyrical Ballads and when
German poet Novalis put together Hymns to the
Night (Hymnen and Die Nacht)
• “Officially” ends in 1832 around the time of Sir
Walter Scott’s and Goethe’s death
3. Major Precepts of Romanticism
• Imagination
• Nature
• Symbolism & Myth
• Emotions & the Self
• The Romantic Hero
• Paradoxical Combinations
• Criticism of Bourgeoisie and the Philistine
• Self-Consciousness & The Individual
• Relativism
4. Imagination
• Contrast to the supremacy of reason and the
Enlightenment
• The creative mind is the human equivalent of the
creative powers of a deity
• Allows humans to constitute reality (we not only
perceive the world around us but we, in part,
create it)
• Focus on “intellectual intuition” and
reconciliation of differences and opposites
5. Nature
• Nature itself was viewed as a work of art, created
by a divine imagination
• Nature was viewed as “organic”
• Romantic nature poetry is essentially a poetry of
meditation and reflection
• Strong shift away from the industrialization and
globalization of the world
• Put the myth back into nature—returned God to
mystical and supernatural state
6. Symbolism & Myth
• Symbols were the human aesthetic correlatives of
nature’s representative language
• Symbolism was valued over allegory because
there could be several responses to a symbol
• Used symbolism and myth to express the
“Inexpressible” or the infinite through the use of
an organic perception
7. Emotions & The Self
• Greater importance on intuition, instincts, and
feelings
• Wordsworth describes poetry as “the spontaneous
overflow of powerful feelings”
• Shift in literary criticism from mimetic to
expressive. Art does not reflect nature, but it
helps to better understand it
• The artist has become the hero
8. The Romantic Hero
• The hero-artist: free experimentation over rules of
genre, composition, and decorum
– Artist is an “inspired” creator rather than a technical
“maker”
– Lauded Shakespeare as a model writer, but rejected the
rules that he followed/created
• The heaven-storming hero: striving for the
unattainable even though it is often beyond what is
permitted
• Boldness is now preferred: each person must create a
system by which to live—individualism rather than
absolutes
9. Paradoxical Combinations
• Realms of existence prior to the conceptions of
“objective” reason were explored.
• The merger of everyday and exotic, nature and
supernatural, appeared in combinations
– Beautiful soul and ugly body: Hugo’s Hunchback
of Notre Dame and Shelley’s Frankenstein
10. Criticism of Bourgeoisie and the Philistine
• The rich aristocrat praising the rural life even though their
money came from urban industry or occupations;
Romance poets funded by rich aristocrats
– Wordsworth’s father was an attorney for an Earl
– Blake was gifted tuition to the Royal Academy
– Lord Byron inherited his wealth from several family
members
• “Philistine” is a person who does not value or know
anything about Art
• “Bourgeoisie” is a person of the upper class—non-working
class
11. Self-Consciousness and Individualism
• Opening statement of Rousseau's Confessions,
first published in 1781—
"I am not made like anyone I have seen; I dare
believe that I am not made like anyone in existence.
If I am not superior, at least I am different.”
•“What lies behind us and what lies before us are
tiny matters compared to what lies within
us.” Ralph Waldo Emerson (American Romantic
writer)
12. Relativism
• Conflict to the Enlightenment: there does not
need to be one truth:
– The concept that points of view have no absolute truth
or validity, having only relative, subjective value
according to differences in perception and
consideration
• The heart has reasons that Reason is not equipped
to understand. The heart was a source of
knowledge -- the location of ideas "felt" as
sensations rather than thoughts.
13. Romanticism in Music
• Beethoven, Wagner, Brahms: works pushed
the standards of composition by including
sorrowful moods, melodramatic climaxes, and
extreme crescendos
• Beethoven’s “Eroica” (Italian for “heroic”) is
an example of Romantic composition
