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Introduction to Romanticism
Romanticism has very little to do with things popularly thought
of as "romantic," although love may occasionally be the subject of
Romantic art. Rather, it is an international artistic and philosophical
movement that redefined the fundamental ways in which people in
Western cultures thought about themselves and about their world.

Historical Considerations

It is one of the curiosities of literary history that the strongholds
of the Romantic Movement were England and Germany, not the
countries of the romance languages themselves. Thus it is from the
historians of English and German literature that we inherit the
convenient set of terminal dates for the Romantic period, beginning
in 1798, the year of the first edition of Lyrical Ballads by
Wordsworth and Coleridge and of the composition of Hymns to the
Night by Novalis, and ending in 1832, the year which marked the
deaths of both Sir Walter Scott and Goethe. However, as an
international movement affecting all the arts, Romanticism begins
at least in the 1770's and continues into the second half of the
nineteenth century, later for American literature than for European,
and later in some of the arts, like music and painting, than in
literature. This extended chronological spectrum (1770-1870) also
permits recognition as Romantic the poetry of Robert Burns and
William Blake in England, the early writings of Goethe and
Schiller in Germany, and the great period of influence for
Rousseau's writings throughout Europe.

The early Romantic period thus coincides with what is often
called the "age of revolutions"--including, of course, the American
(1776) and the French (1789) revolutions--an age of upheavals in
political, economic, and social traditions, the age which witnessed
the initial transformations of the Industrial Revolution. A
revolutionary energy was also at the core of Romanticism, which
quite consciously set out to transform not only the theory and
practice of poetry (and all art), but the very way we perceive the
world. Some of its major precepts have survived into the twentieth
century and still affect our contemporary period.

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 constitute reality, for (as Wordsworth
suggested), we not only perceive the world around us, but also in
part create it. Uniting both reason and feeling (Coleridge described
it 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 two
major 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. As suggested
above, it was often presented as itself a work of art, constructed by
a divine imagination, in emblematic 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.
Symbolism and Myth

Symbolism and myth were given great prominence in the
Romantic conception of art. In the Romantic view, symbols were
the human aesthetic correlatives of nature's emblematic language.
They were valued too because they could simultaneously suggest
many things, and were thus thought superior to the one-to-one

communications of allegory. Partly, it may have been the desire to
express the "inexpressible"--the infinite--through the available
resources of language that led to symbol at one level and myth (as
symbolic narrative) at another.

Other Concepts: Emotion, Lyric Poetry, and the Self

Other aspects of Romanticism were intertwined with the above
three concepts. Emphasis on the activity of the imagination was
accompanied by greater emphasis on the importance of intuition,
instincts, and feelings, and Romantics generally called for greater
attention to the emotions as a necessary supplement to purely
logical reason. When this emphasis was applied to the creation of
poetry, a very important shift of focus occurred. Wordsworth's
definition of all good poetry as "the spontaneous overflow of
powerful feelings" marks a turning point in literary history. By
locating the ultimate source of poetry in the individual artist, the
tradition, stretching back to the ancients, of valuing art primarily
for its ability to imitate human life (that is, for its mimetic qualities)
was reversed. In Romantic theory, art was valuable not so much as
a mirror of the external world, but as a source of illumination of the
world within. Among other things, this led to a prominence for
first-person lyric poetry never accorded it in any previous period.
The "poetic speaker" became less a persona and more the direct
person of the poet. Wordsworth's Prelude and Whitman's "Song of
Myself" are both paradigms of successful experiments to take the
growth of the poet's mind (the development of self) as subject for
an "epic" enterprise made up of lyric components. Confessional
prose narratives such as Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther (1774)
and Chateaubriand's Rene (1801), as well as disguised
autobiographical verse narratives such as Byron's Childe Harold
(1818), are related phenomena. The interior journey and the
development of the self recurred everywhere as subject material for
the Romantic artist. The artist-as-hero is a specifically Romantic
type.

Contrasts With Neoclassicism

Consequently, the Romantics sought to define their goals
through systematic contrast with the norms of "Versailles
neoclassicism." In their critical manifestoes--the 1800 "Preface" to
Lyrical Ballads, the critical studies of the Schlegel brothers in
Germany, the later statements of Victor Hugo in France, and of
Hawthorne, Poe, and Whitman in the United States--they self-
consciously asserted their differences from the previous age (the

literary "ancien regime"), and declared their freedom from the
mechanical "rules." Certain special features of Romanticism may
still be highlighted by this contrast. We have already noted two
major differences: the replacement of reason by the imagination for
primary place among the human faculties and the shift from a
mimetic to an expressive orientation for poetry, and indeed all
literature. In addition, neoclassicism had prescribed for art the idea
that the general or universal characteristics of human behavior were
more suitable subject matter than the peculiarly individual
manifestations of human activity. From at least the opening
statement of Rousseau's Confessions, first published in 1781--"I am
not made like anyone I have seen; I dare believe that I am not made
like anyone in existence. If I am not superior, at least I am
different."--this view was challenged.
Individualism: The Romantic Hero

The Romantics asserted the importance of the individual, the
unique, even the eccentric. Consequently they opposed the
character typology of neoclassical drama. In another way, of
course, Romanticism created its own literary types. The hero-artist
has already been mentioned; there were also heaven-storming types
from Prometheus to Captain Ahab, outcasts from Cain to the
Ancient Mariner and even Hester Prynne, and there was Faust, who
wins salvation in Goethe's great drama for the very reasons--his
characteristic striving for the unattainable beyond the morally
permitted and his insatiable thirst for activity--that earlier had been
viewed as the components of his tragic sin. (It was in fact Shelley's
opinion that Satan, in his noble defiance, was the real hero of
Milton's Paradise Lost.)

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. Although in both Germany and
England there was continued interest in the ancient classics, 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.

The Everyday and the Exotic

The attitude of many of the Romantics to the everyday, social
world around them was complex. It is true that they advanced
certain realistic techniques, such as the use of "local color"
(through down-to-earth characters, like Wordsworth's rustics, or
through everyday language, as in Emily Bronte's northern dialects
or Whitman's colloquialisms, or through popular literary forms,
such as folk narratives). Yet social realism was usually subordinate
to imaginative suggestion, and what was most important were the
ideals suggested by the above examples, simplicity perhaps, or
innocence. Earlier, the 18th-century cult of the noble savage had
promoted similar ideals, but now artists often turned for their
symbols to domestic rather than exotic sources--to folk legends and
older, "unsophisticated" art forms, such as the ballad, to
contemporary country folk who used "the language of commen
men," not an artificial "poetic diction," and to children (for the first
time presented as individuals, and often idealized as sources of
greater wisdom than adults).

Simultaneously, as opposed to everyday subjects, various forms
of the exotic in time and/or place also gained favor, for the
Romantics were also fascinated with realms of existence that were,
by definition, prior to or opposed to the ordered conceptions of
"objective" reason. Often, both the everyday and the exotic
appeared together in paradoxical combinations. In the Lyrical
Ballads, for example, Wordsworth and Coleridge agreed to divide
their labors according to two subject areas, the natural and the
supernatural: Wordsworth would try to exhibit the novelty in what
was all too familiar, while Coleridge would try to show in the
supernatural what was psychologically real, both aiming to
dislodge vision from the "lethargy of custom." The concept of the
beautiful soul in an ugly body, as characterized in Victor Hugo's
Hunchback of Notre Dame and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, is
another variant of the paradoxical combination.

The Romantic Artist in Society

In another way too, the Romantics were ambivalent toward the
"real" social world around them. They were often politically and
socially involved, but at the same time they began to distance
themselves from the public. As noted earlier, high Romantic artists
interpreted things through their own emotions, and these emotions

included social and political consciousness--as one would expect in
a period of revolution, one that reacted so strongly to oppression
and injustice in the world. So artists sometimes took public stands,
or wrote works with socially or politically oriented subject matter.
Yet at the same time, another trend began to emerge, as they
withdrew more and more from what they saw as the confining
boundaries of bourgeois life. In their private lives, they often
asserted their individuality and differences in ways that were to the
middle class a subject of intense interest, but also sometimes of
horror. ("Nothing succeeds like excess," wrote Oscar Wilde, who,
as a partial inheritor of Romantic tendencies, seemed to enjoy
shocking the bourgeois, both in his literary and life styles.) Thus
the gulf between "odd" artists and their sometimes shocked, often
uncomprehending audience began to widen. Some artists may have
experienced ambivalence about this situation--it was earlier pointed
out how Emily Dickinson seemed to regret that her "letters" to the
world would go unanswered. Yet a significant Romantic theme
became the contrast between artist and middle-class "Philistine."
Unfortunately, in many ways, this distance between artist and
public remains with us today.

Spread of the Romantic Spirit

Finally, it should be noted that the revolutionary energy
underlying the Romantic Movement affected not just literature, but
all of the arts--from music (consider the rise of Romantic opera) to
painting, from sculpture to architecture. Its reach was also
geographically significant, spreading as it did eastward to Russia,
and westward to America. For example, in America, the great
landscape painters, particularly those of the "Hudson River
School," and the Utopian social colonies that thrived in the 19th
century, are manifestations of the Romantic spirit on this side of
the Atlantic.

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