ROMANTICISM

If the Enlightenment was a movement, which started among a tiny elite and slowly spread to make its influence felt throughout society, Romanticism was more widespread. No other intellectual/artistic movement has had comparable variety, reach, and staying power since the end of the Middle Ages.

Beginning in the last decades of the 18th century, was deeply connected with the politics of the time, echoing people's fears, hopes, and aspirations. It was the voice of revolution at the beginning of the 19th century and the voice of the Establishment at the end of it. 

This last shift was the result of the triumph of the class which invented, fostered, and adopted as its own the Romantic Movement: the bourgeoisie.

Some of the main topics are: folklore and popular arts, nationalism, emotion, exoticism, religion, individualism and nature.

Folklore and popular arts: Some of the earliest stirrings of the Romantic movement are conventionally traced back to the mid-18th-century interest in folklore which arose in Germany with Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm collecting popular fairy tales and in England with Joseph Addison and Richard Steele treating old ballads as if they were high poetry. These activities set the tone for one aspect of Romanticism: the belief that products of the uncultivated popular imagination could equal or even surpass those of the educated court poets and composers who had previously monopolized the attentions of scholars and connoisseurs.

Nationalism: Became a central theme of Romantic art and political philosophy. From the earliest parts of the movement, with their focus on development of national languages and folklore, and the importance of local customs and traditions, to the movements which would redraw the map of Europe, nationalism was one of the key vehicles of Romanticism, its role, expression and meaning.

Emotion: Romantic writers generally also prized the more tender sentiments of affection, sorrow, and romantic longing. Certain currents of contemporaneous with the Enlightenment inspired them, in particular the writings of Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Exoticism: Another important aspect of Romanticism is the exotic. As Romantics responded to the longing of people for a distant past, they provided images of distant places.   Scott was the most influential force in popularizing the romantic historical novel. Exoticism in literature was inspired by Lord Byron (especially his Childe Harold's Pilgrimage 1812-1818). Whereas the Romantic lyric poetry of Coleridge, Shelley and Wordsworth had a negligible influence outside of their native tongue, the sweep of Byron's longer poems translated well into other languages and other artistic media.

Religion: One of the most complex developments during this period is the transformation of religion into a subject for artistic treatment far removed from traditional religious art. The mixture of disbelief in and fascination with religion evident in such works illustrates a general principal of intellectual history: artistic and social movements almost never behave like rigid clock pendulums, swinging all the way from one direction to another

Individualism: One of the most important developments of this period is the rise in the importance of individualism. It was in the Romantic period, the industrial revolution, that concern with individualism became much more widespread. Byron in literature and Beethoven in music are both examples of romantic individualism taken to extremes. The modern fascination with self-definition and self-invention, the notion that adolescence is naturally a time of rebellion in which one "finds oneself," the idea that the best path to faith is through individual choice, the idea that government exists to serve the individuals who have created it: all of these are products of the romantic celebration of the individual at the expense of society and tradition.

Nature: The subject of the relationship of Romanticism to nature is a vast one. The Romantics, just as they cultivated sensitivity to emotion generally, especially cultivated sensitivity to nature. It came to be felt that to muse by a stream; to view a thundering waterfall or even confront a rolling desert could be morally improving. The violence of ocean storms came to be appreciated as an aesthetic object in any number of paintings, musical tone poems, and written descriptions, as in the opening of Goethe's Faust.

Other interesting themes are: questions without any response, melancholy that comes often to the desperation, world-weariness of living, egocentrism that frequently ends in narcissism, desire of loneliness, scorn for the social and collective thing, and clearly hostile attitude to the common opinion, to the moral prejudices and recovery of an unlimited freedom.

Among 1789 and 1822 with the death of Shelley the English Romanticism reaches its culmination with the five big ones: Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats.