Essay Comparing The Enlightenment And Romanticism

In reading the poems and literary works from both The Enlightenment and Romanticism periods, I’ve noticed that even though they stand for different values they go about it by rebelling against former world views. For example, in The Enlightenment era, people and writers especially, rebelled by valuing scientific facts over religious beliefs. Whereas in the Romanticism era, writers rebelled against reasoning and science. Writers during The Enlightenment period wrote satires, neo-classical dramas, comedies, and philosophies to express their feelings, while during the Romanticism era writers wrote autobiographies, first-person narratives, and lyric poetry. The Enlightenment era was characterized around moderation and rationality believing that people should privilege intellect over behavior, while the Romanticism era was mostly characterized around nature and emotion believing that people should privilege emotion over reason.

Alexander Pope wrote “Essay on Man” which is a philosophical poem that talks about the definition of humanity and rational thinking, which was of major importance during The Enlightenment. In Pope’s “Essay on Man”, he made it clear that he’s a firm believer in God and that when things happen that one doesn’t understand we shouldn’t question it because, “Whatever is, is right” (294). When Pope say’s this, he is basically saying that we were put in this universe for a particular reason even though we may not know at the time what that reason may be and that we should let things happen the way the happen and yield to situations that don’t make sense to us because according to Pope, nothing happens by chance, because chance is “Direction, which thou canst not see” (290). Therefore, meaning that chance is just a course which we can’t see because it doesn’t exist and we should let things happen