Damo, Vince Cyrus N.

BSED – ENGLISH III

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
be seen as a rejection of the precepts of order, calm, harmony, balance, idealization, and
rationality that typified Classism in general and late 18th-century Neoclassism in
particular. It was also to some extent a reaction against the Enlightenment and against
18th-century Rationalism and physical materialism in general. Romanticism
emphasized the individual, the subjective, the irrational, the imaginative, the personal,
the spontaneous, the emotional, the visionary, and the transcendental.

Among the characteristic attitudes of Romanticism were the following: a deepened

appreciation of the beauties of nature; a general exaltation of emotion over reason and
of the senses over intellect; a turning in upon the self and a heightened examination of
human personality and its moods and mental potentialities; a preoccupation with the
genius, the hero, and the exceptional figure in general and a focus on his or her passions
and inner struggles; a new view of the artist as a supremely individual creator, whose
creative spirit is more important than strict adherence to formal rules and traditional
procedures; an emphasis upon imagination as a gateway to transcendent experience and
spiritual truth; an obsessive interest in folk culture, national and ethnic cultural origins,
and the medieval era; and a predilection for the exotic, the remote, the mysterious, the
weird, the occult, the monstrous, the diseased, and even the satanic.

Literature in Romanticism.
Romanticism proper was preceded by several related developments from the mid-18th
century on that can be termed Pre-Romanticism. Among such trends was a new
appreciation of the medieval romance, from which the Romantic movement derives its
name. The romance was a tale or ballad of chivalric adventure whose emphasis on
individual heroism and on the exotic and the mysterious was in clear contrast to the
elegant formality and artificiality of prevailing Classical forms of literature, such as the
French Neoclassical tragedy or the English heroic couplet in poetry. This new interest in
relatively unsophisticated but overtly emotional literary expressions of the past was to
be a dominant note in Romanticism.

Romanticism in English Literature began in the 1790s with the publication of the Lyrical
Ballad of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Wordsworth’s “Preface” to
the second edition (1800) of Lyrical Ballads, in which he described poetry as “the
spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” became the manifesto of the English
Romantic movement in poetry. William Blake was the third principal poet of the
movement’s early phase in England. The first phase of the Romantic movement
in Germany was marked by innovations in both content and literary style and by a
preoccupation with the mystical, the subconscious, and the supernatural. A wealth of
talents, including Friedreich Holdrin, the early Johann Wolfgang, Jean
Paul, Novalis, Ludwig Tieck, August Wilhelm and Friedrich Von, Wilhelm Hendrich,
and Friedrich Schelling, belong to this first phase.

In Revolutionary in France Madame de Stael were the chief initiators of Romanticism,

by virtue of their influential historical and theoretical writings.
The second phase of Romanticism, compromising the period from about 1805 to the
1830s, was marked by a quickening of cultural nationalism and a new attention to
national origins, as attested by the collection and imitation of native folklore, folk
ballads and poetry, folk dance and music, and even previously ignored medieval and
Renaissance works. The revived historical appreciation was translated into imaginative
writing by Sir Walter Scott, who is often considered to have invented the historical
novel. At about this same time English Romantic poetry had reached its zenith in the
works of John Keats, Lord Byron, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. By the 1820s Romanticism
had broadened to embrace the literatures of almost all of Europe. In this later, second,
phase, the movement was less universal in approach and concentrated more on
exploring each nation’s historical and cultural inheritance and on examining the
passions and struggles of exceptional individuals.

Many Romantic ideals were first articulated by German thinkers in the Sturm and
Drang movement, which elevated intuition and emotion above Enlightenment
rationalism. The events and ideologies of the French Revolution were also direct
influences on the movement; many early Romantics throughout Europe sympathized
with the ideals and achievements of French revolutionaries. Romanticism lionized the
achievements of "heroic" individuals – especially artists, who began to be represented as
cultural leaders (one Romantic luminary, Percy Bysshe Shelley, described poets as the
"unacknowledged legislators of the world" in his "Defence of Poetry"). Romanticism also
prioritized the artist's unique, individual imagination above the strictures of classical
form. In the second half of the 19th century, Realism emerged as a response to
Romanticism, and was in some ways a reaction against it. Romanticism suffered an
overall decline during this period, as it was overshadowed by new cultural, social, and
political movements, many of them hostile to the perceived illusions and preoccupations
of the Romantics. However, it has had a lasting impact on Western civilization, and
many "Romantic", "neo-Romantic", and "post-Romantic" artists and thinkers created
their most enduring works after the end of the Romantic Era.