Romanticism Culture: what's behind the emotion of a Romantic

"The Tree of Crows by Caspar David Friedrich."

Romanticism was more than an era in history or a specific culture; it was a way of being. We talked about the themes of the Romantic era in class, but we didn’t cover in depth as to why these people in this period were so emotionally developed.

Although many poems were unpublished during the war, from the fall of the Bastille in 1789 to the defeat at Waterloo in 1815, war was the most important part of British life, and was what the major Romantic writers like Wordsworth were concerned with (Bennet 1). The fall of the Bastille during the French Revolution was a symbol for Romantics as the “overthrow of the feudal, tyrannical rule of the Bourbons, and poets celebrated it in these terms immediately and for some years to follow” (4). Romantics “rejected those aspects of the French Revolution like the Reign of Terror and which seemed to them to have sprung from the heads of the Enlightenment itself” (“Romanticism”). The French Revolution inspired British poets and Romantics to create a new way of being, and the Romantic Movement was almost a reaction against war and the “methods and ideals of the preceding eighteenth-century Enlightenment” (Brinton 4).

Romanticism was the “new thought, the critical idea and the creative effort necessary to cope with the old ways of confronting experience…and an indicative of an age of crisis that would dominate European culture for the next century” (“Romanticism 10). Romantics did what was completely opposite of the Enlightenment. Whereas the famous quote of the Enlightenment was “I think therefore I am,” the Romantic quote may have been “I feel therefore I am” (8). Romantics thought mostly of the emotional self expression through “art, music, poetry, drama, and literature,” whereas the Enlightenment covered only “logic, balance, and rationalism” (Brinton 9). Also, the eras had two very different approaches to love. People from the Enlightenment defined love as “the rubbing together of two membranes” while Romantics thought of love as a “mystery and magic of sexuality in an extensive cult of love” (10). The Enlightenment and Romantic styles of being differ so much that “present-day psychologists have gone so far as to contend that the Enlightenment and Romantic styles of sensibility map onto two fundamentally different personality types” (12). The culture of the era may have started out of spite of the French Revolution and the Enlightenment way of thinking, but it has shown people the right of expression and creativity through the arts, and it has influenced the minds of today.

“Discover yourself -- express yourself, cried the Romantic artist. Play your own music, write your own drama, paint your own personal vision, live, love and suffer in your own way. So instead of the motto, "Dare to know!" take up the battle cry, "Dare to be!" (Kreis 9).

Works Cited

Bennett, Betty T. "British War Poetry in the Age of Romanticism 1793-1815 - Electronic Editions - Romantic Circles." Home - Romantic Circles. Ed. Neil Fraistat and Steven E. Jones. University of Maryland. Web. 03 Apr. 2011. .

Brians, Paul. "Romanticism." Washington State University - Pullman, Washington. 11 Mar. 1998. Web. 04 Apr. 2011. .

Brinton, Crane. "Romanticism." Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Ed. Donald M. Borchert. 2nd ed. Vol. 8. Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2006. 485-489. Gale World History In Context. Web. 4 Apr. 2011.

Kreis, Steven. "The Romantic Era." The History Guide: Lectures on Modern European Intellectual History. Florida Atlantic University, 2001. Web. 03 Apr. 2011.

"Romanticism." Romanticism. Brooklyn College., 12 Feb. 2009. Web. 03 Apr. 2011. .

"The Tree of Crows by Caspar David Friedrich." History in Context: World. Detroit: Gale, 2010. Gale World History In Context. Web. 4 Apr. 2011.