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Defining Romanticism
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Basic chara
cteristics
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Defining the nature of
Romanticism may be approached from the starting
point of
the
primary
importance
of
the
free
expression
of
the
feelings
of
the
artist.
The
importance the Romantics
placed on untrammelled feeling is summed up in the
remark of the German painter
Caspar David Friedrich
that
law
[7]
To
William
Wordsworth
poetry
should
be
spontaneous
overflow
of
powerful
feelings
[8]
In order to
truly express these feelings, the content of the
art
must come from the imagination of
the artist, with as little interference as
possible
from
rules
dictating
what
a work
should
consist
of.
Coleridge
was
not
alone in
believing that there were natural laws governing
these matters which the
imagination,
at
least
of
a
good
creative
artist,
would
freely
and
unconsciously
follow
through
artistic
inspiration
if
left
alone
to
do
so.
[9]
As
well
as
rules,
the
influence of models from other works
would impede the creator's own imagination,
so
originality
was absolutely essential. The concept of the
genius
, or artist who was
able
to
produce
his
own
original
work
through
this
process
of
from
nothingness
is
key
to
Romanticism,
and
to
be
derivative
was
the
worst
sin.
[10][11][12][13]
This idea is
often called
[14]
William Blake
,
The Little Girl Found
, from
Songs of Innocence and
Experience
, 1794
Not
essential to Romanticism, but so widespread as to
be normative, was a strong
belief and
interest in the importance of nature. However this
is particularly in the
effect of nature
upon the artist when he is surrounded by it,
preferably alone. In
contrast
to
the
usually
very
social
art
of
the
Enlightenment
,
Romantics
were
distrustful of the human world, and
tended to believe that a close connection with
nature
was
mentally
and
morally
healthy.
Romantic
art
addressed
its
audiences
directly and
personally with what was intended to be felt as
the personal voice of
the artist. So,
in literature,
the protagonists with
the poets themselves
[15]
According
to
Isaiah
Berlin
,
Romanticism
embodied
new
and
restless
spirit,
seeking
violently
to
burst
through
old
and
cramping
forms,
a
nervous
preoccupation with perpetually changing
inner states of consciousness, a longing
for the unbounded and the indefinable,
for perpetual movement and change, an
effort to return to the forgotten
sources of life, a passionate effort at self-
assertion
both individual and
collective, a search after means of expressing an
unappeasable
yearning for unattainable
goals.
[16]
The te
rm
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The group of words with the root
as
romance
and
Romanesque
, has a
complicated history, but by the middle of the
18th century
romantique
in French were
both in common
use as adjectives of
praise for natural phenomena such as views and
sunsets, in a
sense close to modern
English usage but without the implied sexual
element. The
application of the term to
literature first became common in Germany, where
the
circle around the Schlegel
brothers, critics
August
and
Friedrich
, began to speak of
romantische
Poesie
(
in terms of spirit
rather than merely dating. Friedrich Schlegel
wrote in his
Dialogue
on
Poetry
(1800),
seek
and
find
the
romantic
among
the
older
moderns,
in
Shakespeare, in Cervantes, in Italian
poetry, in that age of chivalry, love and fable,
from
which the
phenomenon and
the
word
itself are
derived.
[17]
In
both French
and German the closeness of the
adjective to
roman
, meaning
the fairly new literary
form of the
novel
, had some effect on
the sense of the word in those languages.
The use of the word did not become
general very quickly, and was probably spread
more
widely
in
France
by
its
persistent
use
by
Madame
de
Sta
?
l
in
her
De
L'Allemagne
(1813),
recounting her travels in
Germany.
[18]
In England
Wordsworth
wrote in a preface to his
poems of 1815 of the
[18]
but in 1820 Byron could still write,
perhaps slightly disingenuously,
in
Germany,
as
well
as
in
Italy,
there
is
a
great
struggle
about
what
they
call
'Classical' and
'Romantic', terms which were not subjects of
classification in England,
at
least
when
I
left
it
four
or
five
years
ago
[19]
It
is
only
from
the
1820s
that
Romanticism certainly
knew itself by its name, and in 1824 the
Acad
é
mie
fran
?
aise
took the wholly ineffective step of
issuing a decree condemning it in
literature.
[20]
The period
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Unsurprisingly,
given its rejection on principle of rules,
Romanticism is not easily
defined, and
the period typically called Romantic varies
greatly between different
countries
and
different
artistic
media
or
areas
of
thought.
Margaret
Drabble