• Romanticism was a powerful reaction against Neoclassicism in liberation of the imagination and rediscovery of Nature. English romantic writers tended to turn their backs upon cities and centers of culture for their inspiration, and to seek subjects and settings for their poems in mountains and valleys, forests and meadows, brooks and roaring cataracts. French romanticists’ works took on a political cast to formulate the concept of “the Rights of Man,” expressing a new spirit of political independence.
• In England, the Romantic Period for poetry is dated from 1798 (publication of Lyrical Ballads, containing works by both Wordsworth and Coleridge) to 1824 (death of Byron).
• Romanticism made much of freedom and imagination. We find Romantic writers in revolt against the authority of reason; they accorded a higher place to the productions of the imagination. Also, far from seeking to avoid the personal and isolated experience, they gloried in their individualism. It was with them that the first person singular began to stud the pages of books. They treasured the traits that distinguished each of themselves from other human beings. They often demonstrated a lively interest in the welfare of humanity, but they sought to understand the problems of the world only through the prisms of their own personalities. The Romantics were—often violently—individualists.
• The elegance of Western culture, of which the Neoclassicists had been most proud, became the bane of the Romantics. Their imagination longed to dwell on far-off, exotic lands. And whereas the Neoclassicists had been interested exclusively in their own times and contemporary society, the Romantics’ thoughts were most at home in a romantic past—the Middle Ages or even primitive eras.
• The Romantics were extraordinarily fond of suffering. They considered it a badge of superiority to go about with blighted, melancholy feelings, to be deeply affected by everything they saw or experienced; to find the tragic implication in the most trifling occurrence was a proof to them that they were sensitive.
• The most influential philosopher during the
Romantic Age was Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He distrusted the exercise
of reason altogether; moreover, he found his golden age in the past, not
the future. Humanity, he taught, had foolishly surrendered the felicity
it once had had; to recapture it, people must turn back the clock, and
pattern life according to the model furnished by the days of the patriarchs
Abraham and Isaac. Rousseau believed that people are by nature “benevolent.”
It is society that has corrupted them. All that people call civilization
has really operated to destroy their happiness; society has distorted their
intrinsic goodness and is responsible for the development of evil.
Only emotion is worthy of reliance.