Romanticism is a movement
in art and literature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in revolt
against the Neoclassicism of the previous centuries. The German poet Friedrich
Schlegel, who is given credit for first using the term romantic to describe
literature, defined it as "literature depicting emotional matter in an
imaginative form." This is as accurate a general definition as can be
accomplished, although Victor Hugo's phrase "liberalism in
literature" is also apt. Imagination, emotion, and freedom are certainly the
focal points of romanticism. 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 (Romantic period). Other
characteristics are as follows:
Social background: two important revolutions:
the French Revolution of 1789-1794 and the English Industrial Revolution.
Many writers in the Romantic period emphasized
feeling and imagination and looked toward nature for insight into the divine.
The individual and his or her subjective experiences and expressions of those
experiences were highly valued. Many scholars see the artistic and aesthetic
freedoms in romanticism in contrast to the ideals of neoclassicism. In addition
to a wealth of poetry, the Romantic period featured significant innovations in
the novel form, including the Gothic novel.
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 (Mambrol “Romanticicsm”).
Romanticism in America flowered somewhat later than in
Europe, embroiled as the new nation was in the struggle for self-definition in
political, economic, and religious terms. It was American independence from
British rule, achieved in 1776, that opened the path to examining national
identity, the development of a distinctly American literary tradition in the
light of Romantically reconceived visions of the self and nature. The
major American Romantics included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Nathaniel
Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, and Herman Melville. While
some of these writers were influenced by European Romantics and philosophers,
nearly all of them were inspired by a nationalistic concern to develop an
indigenous cultural tradition and a distinctly American literature. Indeed,
they helped to define – at a far deeper and more intelligent level than the
crude definitions offered by politicians since then until the present day – the
very concept of American national identity. Like the European Romantics, these
American writers reacted against what they perceived to be the mechanistic and
utilitarian tenor of Enlightenment thinking and the industrial, urbanized world
governed by the ethics and ideals of bourgeois commercialism. They sought to redeem
the ideas of spirit, nature, and the richness of the human self within a
specifically American context. (Mambrol “Romanticicsm”) The Romantic movement, which originated in Germany
but quickly spread to England, France, and beyond, reached America around the
year 1820, some 20 years after William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge
had revolutionized English poetry by publishing Lyrical Ballads. In America as
in Europe, fresh new vision electrified artistic and intellectual circles. Romanticism
in America coincided with the period of national expansion and the discovery of
a distinctive American voice. (American History). Romantic
ideas centered around art as inspiration, the spiritual and aesthetic dimension
of nature, and metaphors of organic growth. Art, rather than science, Romantics argued, could best express
universal truth. The development of the self became a major theme;
self-awareness, a primary method. If,
according to Romantic theory, self and nature were one, self-awareness was not
a selfish dead end but a mode of knowledge opening up the universe. The idea of
“self” which suggested selfishness to earlier generations was redefined. New
compound words with positive meanings emerged: “self-realization,”
“self-expression,” “self-reliance.” (American History)
