Introduction to Romanticism
The "Romantic Period" refers to a movement in art and literature in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries in revolt against the Neoclassicism of the previous centuries. This movement
was based primarily in England, Europe, and America roughly from 1800 to 1860. Romantic
writers (and artists) saw themselves as revolting against the "Age of Reason" (1700-1800) and its
values. Any list of particular characteristics of the literature of romanticism includes subjectivity
and an emphasis on individualism; spontaneity; freedom from rules; solitary life rather than life in
society; the beliefs that imagination is superior to reason and devotion to beauty; love of and
worship of nature; and fascination with the past, especially the myths and mysticism of the
middle ages.
Very generally, we also distinguish "Romantic" from "Classical" values and types of expression,
without referring to any particular time period. Thus, you can come up with a list of oppositions:
ROMANTIC
Emotional
Individualistic
Revolutionary
Loves Solitude & Nature
Fantasy/Introspection
The Particular
Subjective Perception
Satisfaction of Desire
Organic
Creative Energy/Power
Exotic
"Noble Savage"/Outcasts
Idealist Philosophy
NON-ROMANTIC / CLASSICAL
Reasonable and Practical
Public Responsibility
Conservative
Loves Public, Urban Life
External Reality
The Universal
Objective Science
Desire Repressed
Mechanical
Form
Mundane
Bourgeois Family
Materialist/Empirical Philosophy
Romantic Writers:
English poets:
William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy
Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats
American poets: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allen Poe, Henry
David Thoreau, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman
Imagination
The imagination was elevated to a position as the supreme faculty of the mind. This
contrasted distinctly with the traditional arguments for the supremacy of reason. The Romantics
tended to define and to present the imagination as our ultimate "shaping" or creative power, the
approximate human equivalent of the creative powers of nature or even deity. It is dynamic, an
active, rather than passive, power with many functions. Imagination is the primary faculty for
creating all art. On a broader scale, it is also the faculty that helps humans to compose reality, for
(as Wordsworth suggested), we not only perceive the world around us, but also in part create it.
Uniting both reason and feeling (an idea that can be described with the paradoxical phrase,
"intellectual intuition"), imagination is extolled as the ultimate synthesizing faculty, enabling
humans to reconcile differences and opposites in the world of appearance. The reconciliation of
opposites is a central ideal for the Romantics. Finally, imagination is inextricably bound up with
the other major Romantic concepts, for it is presumed to be the faculty which enables us to "read"
nature as a system of symbols.
Nature
"Nature" meant many things to the Romantics. It was often presented as itself a work of art,
constructed by a divine imagination, in symbolic language. For example, throughout "Song of
Myself," Whitman makes a practice of presenting commonplace items in nature--"ants," "heap'd
stones," and "poke-weed"--as containing divine elements, and he refers to the "grass" as a natural
"hieroglyphic," "the handkerchief of the Lord." While particular perspectives with regard to
nature varied considerably--nature as a healing power, nature as a source of subject 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. It was viewed as
"organic," rather than, as in the scientific or rationalist view, as a system of "mechanical" laws,
for Romanticism displaced the rationalist view of the universe as a machine (e.g., the deistic
image of a clock) with the analogue of an "organic" image, a living tree or mankind itself. At the
same time, Romantics gave greater attention both to describing natural phenomena accurately and
to capturing "sensuous nuance"--and this is as true of Romantic landscape painting as of
Romantic nature poetry. Accuracy of observation, however, was not sought for its own sake.
Romantic nature poetry is essentially a poetry of meditation.
Individualism: The Romantic Hero
In style, the Romantics preferred boldness over the preceding age's desire for restraint,
maximum suggestiveness over the neoclassical ideal of clarity, free experimentation over the
"rules" of composition, genre, and decorum, and they promoted the conception of the artist as
"inspired" creator over that of the artist as "maker" or technical master. For the most part, the
Romantics allied themselves with the very periods of literature that the neoclassicists had
dismissed, the Middle Ages and the Baroque, and they embraced the writer whom Voltaire had
called a barbarian, Shakespeare. Although interest in religion and in the powers of faith were
prominent during the Romantic period, the Romantics generally rejected absolute systems,
whether of philosophy or religion, in favor of the idea that each person (and humankind
collectively) must create the system by which to live.
Other Concepts:
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 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.
American Romanticism
American Romantics tend to venerate Nature as a sanctum of non-artificiality, where the Self can
fulfill its potential (the earlier Puritans tended to see nature as the fallen "wilderness," full of "savage"
Indians). American Romantics also champion spiritual intuition or self-reliant individualism (which some
intellectual historians argue is a secularized outgrowth of Reformation Protestant radicalism). They often,
however, illustrate the egotistic, futile, and destructive aspects of their questing heroes, or they highlight
how such self-reliance or intuitions conflict with conventional social and religious dogma. Socially,
American Romantics are usually radically egalitarian and politically progressive (Poe is the exception)
and, in the case of Melville and Whitman, receptive to non-heterosexual relations (Whitman was
definitely gay; Melville perhaps). In terms of literary technique, American Romantics will use symbols,
myths, or fantastic elements (e.g., Walden Pond, the White Whale, the House of Usher) as the focus and
expression of the protagonist's mental processes or to convey deeper psychological or archetypal themes.
Their style is often very original and not rule/convention oriented (only Dickinson writes like Dickinson;
only Whitman, like Whitman).
The primary feature of American Romanticism--the obsession with and celebration of individualism-takes on particular social relevance because U.S. culture has always prized individualism and
egalitarianism. Democracy elevates everyone (white males in this time period, that is) to the same status.
One is no longer part of a traditional, old-world hierarchy. Everyone has a chance to maximize one's own
worth. However, independence also leads to a sense of isolation. Without traditional context, insecurity
about values arises, and thus, somewhat paradoxically, there emerges a continued preoccupation with
what everyone else thinks. The average middle-class person aspires to be like everyone else. American
Romantic writers like democracy and see the dignity of common folk, but also--usually only implicitly-are troubled by the loss of distinction. It is key to see that American Romantics can both celebrate the
"common man" and their own, more spiritually/psychologically elite selves.