The Essence of Romanticsim

The Essence of Romanticsim

Romanticism, which first appeared in the 1770s in Germany and England, grew out of the entanglement of thoughts and perceptions in the eighteenth century known as the Enlightenment. The Movement swept through Europe like a candle dropped in a hay barn, and by the 1820s its far-reaching flames had engulfed the French; the rest of Europe followed. Whereas the eighteenth century focused on reason and judgment, law and order, and the values of society universally, Romanticists emphasized imagination, emotion, freedom, individual worth, nature, far away places and forgotten times. Because of its many facets, attempting to define Romanticism can become haphazard and difficult, as each artist sought to express himself through the Movements many palettes.

One major aspect of Romanticism was a preoccupation with nature. Much of literature championed this idol. While Rousseau's contemporaries worship the neoclassical atheistic worldview and the accomplishments of science, he went a separate path. In his book, The Noble Savage, Jean-Jacque Rousseau birthed the concept of man as noble only in his natural state. Rousseau feels that science and society have maimed the nature of man who must live more in his natural state to become truly righteous. Rousseau goes even further in his last piece, Les Reveries du Promeneur Solitaire (Reveries of a Solitary Walker), when he implies that the only path to understanding and communing with ones self is through nature. He and other Romantic novelists and poets worshipped nature as noble, sublime, and pure, the ultimate good. As such, man, himself was to valued as an individual. Wordsworth reveals this aspect of romanticism in "She Dwelt Among the Untrodden W...

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...nse and Sensibility. Because of this reverence of love as something beautiful and mysterious, natural, love became more than a reference to the relationships between men and women; it became romantic.

Romanticism was more than just an artistic and literary movement; it was a change in the way that people think. It affects even the modern day poets and writers and the very ideals by which we live: love (and the romantic view that we have of it today) and dreams of the "good old days." To fully express the extent and influence of romanticism, or the methods through which it forever changed the world, would be impossible. But, through the methods alluded to in the above text, and many others, the Romantic Movement transformed the world through literature and art (among other areas not mentioned in this paper), leaving an indelible mark upon Western civilization.