ROMANTIC PERIOD

What is Romanticism?

Romanticism was an artistic and intellectual movement which took place in Europe between the late eighteenth and
mid-nineteenth centuries. Understood broadly as a break from the guiding principles of the Enlightenment – which
established reason as the foundation of all knowledge – the Romantic Movement emphasised the importance of
emotional sensitivity and individual subjectivity. For the Romantics, imagination, rather than reason, was the most
important creative faculty.

Romanticism in literature
Romanticism in English literature started in the late eighteenth century, with the poets William Blake, William
Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. It continued into the nineteenth century with the second generation of
Romantic poets, most notably Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats and Lord Byron.

In contrast to the reasoned detachment of the Enlightenment, the poetic works of Blake, Wordsworth and Coleridge
were characterised by their emotional sensitivity and reverence for nature.

Though the second generation of Romantic poets, especially Shelley and Byron, became notorious for their subversive
and salacious works, later Romantic poetry also retained many characteristics established by Blake and Wordsworth.
Keats’ odes, much like the poetry of Wordsworth, took inspiration from nature, and Bryon’s poetry had a strong
introspective character.

Shelley, Byron and Keats also acquired a posthumous reputation as ‘Romantic’ because many aspects of their lives –
including their travels around Europe and the fact they died young – conformed to the emerging nineteenth-century
ideal-type of a Romantic hero.

Romanticism in art
Nature was also a source of inspiration in the visual arts of the Romantic Movement. Breaking with the longer tradition
of historical and allegorical paintings, which took scenes from history or the Bible as their principle subject matter,
Romantic artists like J. M. W. Turner and John Constable – chose instead to depict the natural world, most notably
landscapes and maritime scenes.

Romantic artists depicted nature to be not only beautiful, but powerful, unpredictable and destructive. This
constituted a radical departure from Enlightenment representations of the natural world as orderly and benign.

Romanticism in music
The Romantic Movement in music originated in Beethoven, whose later works drew upon and developed the classical
styles of Mozart and Haydn. Beethoven’s later symphonies and piano sonatas were made distinctive by their
expressiveness and strong emotive quality. These characteristics set the tone for successive generations of Romantic
composers in Europe, including Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann and Felix Mendelssohn.

Romanticism as a mind-set
Romanticism may be best understood not as a movement, but as a mind-set. The artists, poets and musicians of the
Romantic period were united by their determination to use their art to convey emotion or provoke an emotional
response from audiences.

There was also something pioneering – almost revolutionary – about Romanticism. It involved breaking with the past,
and consciously moving away from the ideas and traditions of the Enlightenment. In so doing, Romanticism
fundamentally changed the prevailing attitudes toward nature, emotion, reason and even the individual.
: a literary, artistic, and philosophical movement originating in the 18th century, characterized chiefly by a reaction
against neoclassicism and an emphasis on the imagination and emotions, and marked especially in English literature
by sensibility and the use of autobiographical material, an exaltation of the primitive and the common man, an
appreciation of external nature, an interest in the remote, a predilection for melancholy, and the use in poetry of older
verse forms
In a general sense, Romanticism refers to several distinct groups of artists, poets, writers, musicians, political,
philosophical and social thinkers and trends of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Europe. This
movement is typically characterized by its reaction against the Enlightenment; while the Enlightenment emphasized
the primacy of reason, Romanticism emphasized imagination and strong emotion. Rather than an epistemology of
deduction, the Romantics demonstrated elements of knowledge through intuition. A precise characterization and a
specific description of Romanticism were objects of intellectual history and literary history for all of the twentieth
century without the emergence of any great measure of consensus.