romanticism summary essay

Romanticism

Summary of Romanticism

At the end of the 18 th century and well into the 19 th , Romanticism quickly spread throughout Europe and the United States to challenge the rational ideal held so tightly during the Enlightenment . The artists emphasized that sense and emotions - not simply reason and order - were equally important means of understanding and experiencing the world. Romanticism celebrated the individual imagination and intuition in the enduring search for individual rights and liberty. Its ideals of the creative, subjective powers of the artist fueled avant-garde movements well into the 20 th century. Romanticist practitioners found their voices across all genres, including literature, music, art, and architecture. Reacting against the sober style of Neoclassicism preferred by most countries' academies, the far reaching international movement valued originality, inspiration, and imagination, thus promoting a variety of styles within the movement. Additionally, in an effort to stem the tide of increasing industrialization, many of the Romanticists emphasized the individual's connection to nature and an idealized past.

Key Ideas & Accomplishments

• In part spurred by the idealism of the French Revolution, Romanticism embraced the struggles for freedom and equality and the promotion of justice. Painters began using current events and atrocities to shed light on injustices in dramatic compositions that rivaled the more staid Neoclassical history paintings accepted by national academies.
• Romanticism embraced individuality and subjectivity to counteract the excessive insistence on logical thought. Artists began exploring various emotional and psychological states as well as moods. The preoccupation with the hero and the genius translated to new views of the artist as a brilliant creator who was unburdened by academic dictate and tastes. As the French poet Charles Baudelaire described it, "Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject nor in exact truth, but in a way of feeling."
• In many countries, Romantic painters turned their attention to nature and plein air painting, or painting out of doors. Works based on close observation of the landscape as well as the sky and atmosphere elevated landscape painting to a new, more respectful level. While some artists emphasized humans at one with and a part of nature, others portrayed nature's power and unpredictability, evoking a feeling of the sublime - awe mixed with terror - in the viewer.
• Romanticism was closely bound up with the emergence of newly found nationalism that swept many countries after the American Revolution. Emphasizing local folklore, traditions, and landscapes, Romanticists provided the visual imagery that further spurred national identity and pride. Romantic painters combined the ideal with the particular, imbuing their paintings with a call to spiritual renewal that would usher in an age of freedom and liberties not yet seen.

Key Artists

Overview of Romanticism

When he was four years old, William Blake had a vision of "the Heavenly host crying Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God Almighty!" Later, expressed in his poetry and visual art, his prophetic visions and belief in the "real and eternal world" of the imagination resulted in the unknown artist being acknowledged as the "father of Romanticism."

Artworks and Artists of Romanticism

The Nightmare

Artist: Henry Fuseli

Fuseli's strange and macabre painting depicts a ravished woman, draped across a divan with a small, hairy incubus sitting on top of her, staring out menacingly at the viewer. A mysterious black mare with white eyes and flaring nostrils appears behind her, entering the scene through lush, red curtains. We seem to be looking at the effects and the contents of the woman's dream at the same time. Fuseli's ghastly scene was the first of its kind in the midst of The Age of Reason, and Fuseli became something of a transitional figure. While Fuseli held many of the same tenets as the Neoclassicists (notice the idealized depiction of the woman), he was intent on exploring the dark recesses of human psychology when most were concerned with scientific exploration of the objective world. When shown in 1782 at London's Royal Academy exhibition, the painting shocked and frightened visitors. Unlike the paintings the public was used to seeing, Fuseli's subject matter was not drawn from history or the bible, nor did it carry any moralizing intent. This new subject matter would have wide-ranging repercussions in the art world. Even though the woman is bathed in a bright light, Fuseli's composition suggests that light is unable to penetrate the darker realms of the human mind. The relationship between the mare, the incubus, and the woman remains suggestive and not explicit, heightening the terrifying possibilities. Fuseli's combination of horror, sexuality, and death insured the image's notoriety as a defining example of Gothic horror, which inspired such writers as Mary Shelly and Edgar Allan Poe.

Oil on canvas - Detroit Institute of Art

The Ancient of Days from Europe a Prophecy copy B

Artist: William Blake

The Ancient of Days served as the frontispiece to Blake's book, Europe a Prophecy (1794), which contained 18 engravings. This image depicts Urizen, a mythological figure first created by the poet in 1793 to represent the rule of reason and law and influenced by the image of God described in the Book of Proverbs as one who "set a compass upon the face of the earth." Depicted as an old man with flowing white beard and hair in an illuminated orb, surrounded by a circle of clouds, Urizen crouches, as his left hand extends a golden compass over the darkness below, creating and containing the universe. Blake combines classical anatomy with a bold and energetic composition to evoke a vision of divine creation. Blake eschewed traditional Christianity and felt instead that imagination was "the body of God." His highly original and often mysterious poems and images were meant to convey the mystical visions he often experienced. Europe a Prophecy reflected his disappointment in the French Revolution that he felt had not resulted in true freedom but in a world full of suffering as reflected in England and France in the 1790s. Little known during his lifetime, Blake's works were rediscovered by the Pre-Raphaelites at the end of the 19 th century, and as more artists continued to rediscover him in the 20 th century, he has become one of the most influential of the Romantic artists.

Relief etching with hand coloring - Glasgow University Library, Glasgow Scotland

Bonaparte Visits the Plague Stricken in Jaffa

Artist: Antoine Jean Gros

This painting depicts Napoleon I, not yet the Emperor, visiting his ailing soldiers in 1799 in Jaffa, Syria, at the end of his Egyptian Campaign. His troops had violently sacked the city but were subsequently stricken in an outbreak of plague. Gros creates a dramatic tableau of light and shade with Napoleon in the center, as if on a stage. He stands in front of a Moorish arcade and touches the sores of one of his soldiers, while his staff officer holds his nose from the stench. In the foreground, sick and dying men, many naked, suffer on the ground in the shadows. A Syrian man on the left, along with his servant who carries a breadbasket, gives bread to the ill, and two men behind them carry a man out on a stretcher. While Gros' teacher Jaques Louis David also portrayed Napoleon in all of his mythic glory, Gros, along with some of David's other students, injected a Baroque dynamism into their compositions to create a more dramatic effect than David's Neoclassicism offered. Gros' depiction of suffering and death, combined with heroism and patriotism within an exotic locale became hallmarks of many Romantic paintings. The use of color and light highlights Napoleon's gesture, meant to convey his noble character in addition to likening him to Christ, who healed the sick. Napoleon commissioned the painting, hoping to silence the rumors that he had ordered fifty plague victims poisoned. The work was exhibited at the 1804 Salon de Paris, its appearance timed to occur between Napoleon's proclaiming himself as emperor and his coronation.

Oil on canvas - Musée du Louvre, Paris France

The Third of May 1808

Artist: Francisco Goya

This groundbreaking work depicts the public execution of several Spaniards by Napoleonic troops. On the left, lit up against a hill, a man in a white shirt holds out his arms as he kneels and faces the firing squad. Several men cluster around him with facial expressions and body language expressing a tumult of emotion. A number of the dead lie on the ground beside them and, to their right, a group of people, all with their faces in their hands, knowing they will be next. On the right, the firing squad aims their rifles, forming a single faceless mass. A large square lantern stands between the two groups, dividing the scene between shadowy executioners and victims. The painting draws upon the traditional religious motifs, as the man in the white shirt resembles a Christ-like figure, his arms extended in the shape of the cross, and a close-up of his hands reveals a mark in his right palm like the stigmata. Yet, the painting is revolutionary in its unheroic treatment, the flatness of its perspective, and its matte almost granular pigments. Additionally, its depiction of a contemporary event experienced by ordinary individuals bucked academic norms that favored timeless Neoclassical vignettes. Goya intended to both witness and commemorate Spanish resistance to Napoleon's army during the Peninsular War of 1808-1814, a war marked by extreme brutality. The painting's dark horizon and sky reflect the early morning hours in which the executions took place, but also convey a feeling of overwhelming darkness. The art historian Kenneth Clark described it as, "the first great picture which can be called revolutionary in every sense of the word, in style, in subject, and in intention." Goya's revolutionary painting would be instrumental in the rise of Realism's frank depictions of everyday life, of Picasso's declarations against the horrors of war, and the Surrealists' exploration of dream-like subject matter.

Oil on canvas - Museo del Prado, Madrid Spain

La Grande Odalisque

Artist: Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres

This painting depicts a reclining nude, a member of a harem, holding a feathered fan amidst sumptuous textiles. Her hair is wrapped in a turban, and a hookah sits at her feet. She turns her head over her shoulder to peer out at the viewer. Ingres was one of the best known of the Neoclassical painters, and while he continued to defend the style, this work reflects a Romantic tendency. The image recalls Titan's Venus of Urbino (1528) and echoes the pose of Jacque-Louis David's Portrait of Madame Récamier (1809), but a Mannerist influence is also apparent in the figure's anatomical distortions. Her head is a little too small, and her arms do not appear to be the same length. When the work was shown at the 1819 Salon, these distortions prompted critics to claim she had no bones, no structure, and too many vertebrae. The work is a well-known example of Orientalism. By placing a European nude within the context of a Middle-Eastern harem, the subject could be given an exotic and openly erotic treatment. Subsequent scholars have suggested that because the woman is a concubine in a sultan's harem, the distortions of her figure are symbolic, meant to convey the sultan's erotic gaze upon her figure. As a result, the work points the way to Romanticism's emphasis on depicting a subject subjectively rather than objectively or according to an idealized standard of beauty. Ingres's use of color and his flattening of the figure would be important examples for 20 th -century artists like Picasso and Matisse, who also eschewed classical ideals in their representations of individuals.

Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog

Artist: Caspar David Friedrich

In this painting, an aristocratic man steps out upon a rocky crag as he surveys the landscape before him, with his back turned toward the viewer. Out of swirling clouds of fog, tall pinnacles of rocks loom, and a majestic peak on the left and a rock formation on the right fill the horizon. Many of Friedrich's landscapes depict a solitary figure in an overwhelming landscape that stands in for a Byronic hero, overlooking and dominating the view. While Friedrich made plein air sketches in the mountains of Saxony and Bohemia in preparation for this painting, the landscape is essentially an imaginary one, a composite of specific views. The place of the individual in the natural world was an abiding theme of the Romantic painters. Here, the individual wanderer atop a precipice contemplating the world before him seems to suggest mastery over the landscape, but at the same time, the figure seems small and insignificant compared the sublime vista of mountains and sky that stretch out before him. Friedrich was a master of presenting the sublimity of nature in its infinite boundlessness and tempestuousness. Upon contemplation, the world, in its fog, ultimately remains unknowable.

Oil on canvas - Kunsthalle Hamburg, Hamburg German

The Raft of the Medusa

Artist: Théodore Géricault

Géricault depicts the desperate survivors of a shipwreck after weeks at sea on a wave-tossed raft beneath a stormy sky. At the front of the raft, a black man waves a shirt trying to flag down a ship barely visible on the horizon, while behind him others struggle forward raising their arms in hope of rescue. In the foreground, a disconsolate older man holds onto the nude corpse of his dead son, the body of a man hangs off the raft trailing in the water, and to the far left lies a partial corpse, severed at the waist. The scene depicts the survivors of the wreck of the Medusa, a French Royal Navy frigate sent to colonize Senegal in 1816. The ship ran aground on a sandbank and began to sink, but there were not enough lifeboats. Some of the survivors built a makeshift raft to reach the African shore, but they were quickly lost at sea. Many died, and others resorted to violence and cannibalism. The artist did months of research, interviewing and sketching the survivors, dissecting cadavers in his studio, and recruiting friends to model, including the painter Delacroix. Géricault's use of light and shadow as well as organizing the scene along two diagonals creates a dramatic and intense vision. Beginning with the bodies in the lower left, the viewer follows the eyes and gestures of the raft's inhabitants to a man, borne on the shoulders of his companions, waving a cloth - a sign of hope. From the shadows below the sail, one follows another diagonal to the bottom right to see a corpse, partially shrouded, slipping off the raft into the sea. This organization, coupled with the majestic and stormy sky speaks to the Romantic tastes for the terrible and the sublime. Intended as a profound critique of a social and political system by depicting the tragic consequences and suffering of the marginal members of society, the painting is a pioneering example of protest art. The famous 19 th -century art critic Jules Michelet (who coined the term The Renaissance ) ascribed a broader view of Géricault's subject, suggesting that "our whole society is aboard the raft of the Medusa."

The Hay Wain

Artist: John Constable

This rural landscape depicts a hay wain, a kind of cart, drawn by three horses crossing a river. On the left bank, a cottage, known as Willy Lott's Cottage for the tenant farmer who lived there, stands behind Flatford Mill, which was owned by Constable's father. Constable knew this area of the Suffolk countryside well and said, "I should paint my own places best, painting is but another word for feeling." He made countless en plein air sketches in which he engaged in near scientific observations of the weather and the effects of light. In Constable's landscape, man does not stand back and observe nature but is instead intimately a part of nature, just as the trees and birds are. The figuring driving the cart is not out of scale with his environment. Constable depicted the oneness with nature that so many of the Romantic poets declared. Constable found little acclaim in his home country of England because of his refusal to follow a traditional academic path and his insistence on pursuing the lowliest of genres: landscape painting. The French Romantics, however, took him up enthusiastically after seeing this work in the 1824 Paris Salon. His ability to capture the way fleeting atmosphere determines how we see the landscape inspired such artists as Eugène Delacroix. While The Hay Wain may not have been well-received by his countrymen at the time, in 2005 it was the voted second most popular painting in England.

Oil on canvas - The National Gallery, London

Liberty Leading the People (July 28, 1830)

Artist: Eugène Delacroix

This famous and influential painting depicts the Paris uprising in July 1830. Delacroix, though, does not present an actual event but an allegory of revolution. A bare-chested woman, representing the idea of Liberty, wears a Phryggian cap, carries a bayonet in one hand and raises the tricolor flag in the other, encouraging the rebellious crowd forward on their path to victory. While her figure and the dress draped over her body evokes the Greek classical ideal, Delacroix includes her underarm hair, suggesting a real person and not just an ideal. Other contemporary details and political symbols can be found in the portrayal of various classes of Parisian society. A boy, wearing a beret worn by students carries a cartridge pouch on his shoulder and his cavalry pistols, a factory worker brandishes a saber and wears sailor trousers with an apron, and a man wearing the waistcoat and top hat of fashionable urban society is perhaps a self-portrait of Delacroix. The wounded man who kneels at Liberty's feet and looks up at Liberty is a Parisian temporary worker. Each detail in the image carries political significance, as the beret with a white royalist and a red ribbon denotes the liberal faction, and a Cholet handkerchief, a symbol of a Royalist leader, is used to fasten a pistol to a man's abdomen. The right background is relatively empty, and though the towers of Notre Dame place the scene in Paris, parts of the urbanscape are purely imagined. Delacroix said of the work, "I have undertaken a modern subject, a barricade, and although I may not have fought for my country, at least I shall have painted for her." He had witnessed the event, describing, "Three days amid gunfire and bullets, as there was fighting all around. A simple stroller like myself ran the same risk of stopping a bullet as the impromptu heroes who advanced on the enemy with pieces of iron fixed to broom handles." Delacroix used the dynamic pyramidal arrangement, chiaroscuro, and color to create a scene of clamorous drama that highlights heroism, death, and suffering, quintessential themes of the Romantic movement. Delacroix's bohemianism, his personal vision, and his refusal of academic norms, hallmarks of the Romantic attitude, made him a model for many modern artists.

The Oxbow, View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm

Artist: Thomas Cole

The American Thomas Cole depicts a view of the winding Connecticut River from Mount Holyoke in Massachusetts. A heavily wooded promontory overlooks a flat plain marked by cultivated fields where the wide river meandered over a long period of time and formed an oxbow, or bend, in its flow, and hills rise in the background. The diagonal created by the promontory divides the scene into two triangles, juxtaposing the stormy and green wilderness on the left with the sunlit and cultivated plains on the right. In the lower right, a single human figure, the artist himself, is depicted at work. Cole thus presents the artist in harmony with nature. Thomas Cole was among the most important and influential of the Hudson Valley School painters. While traveling in Europe from 1829-1832, the artist traced this view from Basil Hall's Forty Etchings Made with the Camera Lucida in North America in 1827 and 1828 . Wanting to counter Hall's criticism of Americans as indifferent to their native landscape, Cole wanted to depict the uniqueness of the American landscape as "a union of the picturesque, the sublime, and the magnificent." This Romantic concept found its way into future depictions of the American landscape by the likes of other painters and photographers, including Ansel Adams.

Oil on canvas - The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York New York

The Slave Ship

Artist: J.M.W. Turner

This painting depicts a seascape, the ocean a swirl of chaotic waves beneath a stormy sky that is lit up with red and yellow as if on fire. On the horizon, a ship with its sails unfurled appears to be headed directly into rough dark waters. Shackled human forms, some partially glimpsed, are scattered in the foreground like debris, as sharks and other fish circle and close in upon the flailing swimmers. Turner painted this image after reading Thomas Clarkson's The History and Abolition of the Slave Trade (1808) that recounted how the captain of the slave ship Zong ordered 133 slaves thrown overboard so that he could collect the insurance payments on his human cargo. An ardent abolitionist, Turner hoped that the work would inspire Prince Albert to do more to combat slavery around the globe. Turner captured the philosopher Edmond Burke's concept of the "sublime," the feeling one senses in the presence of nature's overwhelming grandeur and power. In this image, the human figures, and even the ship on the horizon, are minuscule, and the emphasis on the water and the sky conveys a sense of humanity overwhelmed. The blood red color of the sky and the black caps of the waves convey the emotional intensity of the natural world, and the vertical ray of light from the sun that divides the ocean in half seems almost an apocalyptic vision, the presence of a divine witness. Turner's quick brush strokes create a sense of frenzy and chaos, overpowering the barely visible struggling human forms. His work influenced Romanticism's depiction of nature as a dramatic and tumultuous struggle.

Oil on canvas - Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Massachusetts

Beginnings of Romanticism

The term Romanticism was first used in Germany in the late 1700s when the critics August and Friedrich Schlegal wrote of romantische Poesie ("romantic poetry"). Madame de Staël, an influential leader of French intellectual life, following the publication of her account of her German travels in 1813, popularized the term in France. In 1815 the English poet William Wordsworth, who became a major voice of the Romantic movement and who felt that poetry should be "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings," contrasted the "romantic harp" with the "classic lyre." The artists that considered themselves part of the movement saw themselves as sharing a state of mind or an attitude toward art, nature, and humanity but did not rely on strict definitions or tenets. Bucking established social order, religion, and values, Romanticism became a dominant art movement throughout Europe by the 1820s.

Literary Predecessors

An early prototype of Romanticism was the German movement Sturm und Drang , a term usually translated as "storm and stress." Though it was primarily a literary and musical movement from the 1760s to the 1780s, it had a great impact and influence on public and artistic consciousness. Emphasizing emotional extremes and subjectivity, the movement took its name from the title of the play Romanticism (1777) by Friedrich Maxmilian Klinger.

The most famous advocate of the movement was the German writer and statesman Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, whose novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) became a cultural phenomenon. Depicting the emotionally anguished story of a young artist who, in love with the woman who is engaged and then married to the artist's friend, commits suicide, the novel's popularity caused what came to be called "Werther Fever," as young men adopted the protagonist's clothing and manner. Some copycat suicides even occurred, and countries like Denmark and Italy banned the novel. Goethe himself renounced the novel as he later turned away from any association with Romanticism in favor of a classical approach. Nevertheless, the idea of the artist as a solitary genius, emotionally anguished, whose originality and imagination was spurned by the rational world, gripped public consciousness, becoming a model for the romantic hero of the subsequent era.

In the 1800s the British poet Lord Gordon Byron became a celebrity upon the publication of his Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812), and the term "Byronic hero," was coined to denote the figure of the lone and brooding genius, torn between his best and worst traits.

Romanticism in the Visual Arts

Both the English poet and artist William Blake and the Spanish painter Francisco Goya have been dubbed "fathers" of Romanticism by various scholars for their works' emphasis on subjective vision, the power of the imagination, and an often darkly critical political awareness. Blake, working principally in engravings, published his own illustrations alongside his poetry that expressed his vision of a new world, creating mythical worlds full of gods and powers, and sharply critiquing industrial society and the oppression of the individual. Goya explored the terrors of irrationality in works like his Black Paintings (1820-23), which conveyed the nightmarish forces underlying human life and events.

In France, the painter Antoine-Jean Gros influenced the artists Théodore Géricault and Eugène Delacroix who subsequently led and developed the Romantic movement. Chronicling the military campaigns of Napoleon Bonaparte in paintings like Bonaparte Visits the Plague Stricken in Jaffa (1804), Gros emphasized the emotional intensity and suffering of the scene.

Théodore Géricault's painting The Raft of the Medusa (1819) and Eugene Delacroix's The Barque of Dante (1822) brought Romanticism to the attention of a larger public. Both paintings scandalized the Paris Salons that they were exhibited in, Géricault in 1820 and Delacroix in 1822. Deviating from the Neoclassical style favored by the Academy and using contemporary subject matter outraged the Academy and the larger public. The depiction of emotional and physical extremity and varied psychological states would become the hallmarks of French Romanticism .

Following Géricault's early death in 1824, Delacroix became the leader of the Romantic movement, bringing to it his emphasis on color as a mode of composition and the use of expressive brushwork to convey feeling. As a result, by the 1820s Romanticism had become a dominant art movement throughout the Western world.

In England, Germany, and the United States, the leading Romantic artists focused primarily on landscape, as seen in the works of the British artist John Constable , the German Caspar David Friedrich , and the American Thomas Cole , but always with the concern of the individual's relation to nature.

A Revolutionary Movement

Largely developing during the French Revolution, Romanticism was allied with a revolutionary and rebellious spirit. The rule of reason and law of the Enlightenment was perceived as confining and mechanistic. As a result, artists turned to scenes of rebellion and protest. Géricault intended The Raft of the Medusa (1818-19), inspired by a true account of a shipwreck, as an indictment of the French government's policies that led to the tragedy. Similarly, Turner's The Slave Ship (1840) was intended to influence the British government into a more active abolition policy. Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People (1830) was created to support the uprising of the people of Paris against the restoration government of Charles X. Delacroix also painted a number of works depicting the Greek fight for independence against the Ottoman Empire. His Scène des massacres de Scio ( Massacre at Chios ) (1824) depicts the survivors of a massacre that occurred when the Ottoman Empire conquered an island of rebellious Greeks and killed or enslaved most of the inhabitants.

The Sublime

In 1756, the English philosopher Edmund Burke published A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful , and in 1790, the German philosopher Emanuel Kant, who explored the relationship between the human mind and experience, developed Burke's notions in Critique of Judgment . The idea of The Sublime came to hold a central place in much of Romanticism in order to counter Enlightenment rationality. Burke explained, "The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature . . . is Astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. In this case the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other." To experience the sublime, one does not just experience something beautiful but something that overtakes one's rational sense of objectivity. The awe and terror experienced by observing a great storm or an infinite vista make the individual contemplate his or her place in the natural world. This state, though, necessitates that one is at some remove from what one is seeing, that one is not in danger of being physically harmed by the storm or lost in the wilderness. When one tries to comprehend the boundlessness, or formlessness, of nature's power, one feels overwhelmed emotionally. The experience of the sublime triggers self-examination that was crucial to Romanticism. Many Romantic painters sought to evoke the sublime in their landscape paintings, portraying stormy seas and skies witnessed by a solitary individual.

Orientalism

As early as the Renaissance, artists depicted the Middle East through exoticized images, as reflected in The Reception of the Ambassadors in Damascus (1511) by an anonymous Venetian painter. As the art critic Andrew Graham Dixon described, the painting attempted to compress all that made Damascus "vivid and strange, to Venetian eyes, within the scope of a single canvas: figures in turbans; a laden camel on its way to the bazaar; the great Mosque; the citadel; the public baths; private houses and their distinctive, lush walled gardens." In the 19 th century a fascination with Middle-Eastern subjects overtook both Neoclassical and Romantic painting, as seen in treatments of the nude like Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres' Grande Odalisque (1814), or the popularity of harem scenes like Delacroix's The Women of Algiers (1834). Romantic painters projected desires, fears, and the unknown into their depictions of African and Middle Eastern scenes.

Subsequently, scholars have reevaluated these depictions of an exoticized Middle East. The cultural critic and historian Edward Said coined the term "Orientalism" with his influential book, Orientalism (1978). Said argued that in its depictions of the Middle East, Western art and literature showed a "subtle and persistent Eurocentric prejudice against Arabo-Islamic peoples and their culture." This prejudice was reflected in stereotypical depictions of Middle Eastern culture and people as primitive, irrational, and exotic.

Romanticism: Concepts, Styles, and Trends

Romanticism in germany.

During the Enlightenment, or The Age of Reason, German Romantic painters turned their sights to interior emotions instead of reasoned observations. They looked to previous eras, including the Middle Ages, for examples of men living in harmony with nature and each other. The Nazarenes, a group of painters founded in Vienna in 1809, favored medieval and early Italian Renaissance painting, repudiating the popular Neoclassical style preferred at the time. The leading German Romanticist Caspar David Friedrich worked predominantly in landscape painting and explored man's relation to the land. Landscape painting became an allegory for the human soul as well as a symbol of freedom and boundlessness that subtly critiqued the political restrictedness of the time.

Romanticism in Spain

In the midst of the Peninsular War raged by Napoleon and the Spanish War of Independence, Spanish Romantic painters began exploring more subjective views of landscapes and portraits, valorizing the individual. Francisco de Goya was by far the most prominent of the Spanish Romantics. While he was the official painter for the Royal Court, toward the end of the 18 th century, he began exploring the imaginary, the irrational, and the horrors of human behavior and war. His works, including the painting The Third of May, 1808 (1814) and the series of etchings The Disasters of War (1812-15), stand as powerful rebukes of war during the Enlightenment era. Increasingly withdrawn, Goya made a series of Black Paintings (1820-23) that explored the terrors held within the innermost recesses of the human psyche.

Romanticism in France

After the Napoleonic Wars ended with Napoleon in exile, the Romantic painters began challenging the Neoclassicism of Jacques Louis David , the foremost painter during the French Revolution, and the overall Neoclassical style favored by the Academy. Unlike their German counterparts, the French had a larger repertoire of subjects that included portraiture and history painting. Artists such as Jean-Léon Gérôme and Eugène Delacroix created many genre scenes of North Africa, ushering in a vogue for Orientalism , and their dramatically staged compositions of light and color highlighted the horrors of contemporary events and tragedies.

The French also developed a strong sculptural rendition of Romanticism. Géricault experimented in sculpture, creating Nymph and Satyr (1818), a piece that depicted a suggestive and violent encounter between the two mythological figures. He also created works like his Flayed Horse I (c. 1820-24) that combined his anatomical knowledge with the horse, one of his favorite subjects, within a dark and disturbing vision. Romanticist sculpture was drawn to scenes of beasts of prey and fighting animals in which the animals were depicted as a writhing surge of bodies. Portraying a savage beast overwhelming delicate beauty, such works were meant to convey the Romantic sense of terribiltà , the feeling of awe or terror created by the sublime. The most famous of animal sculptors was Antoine-Louis Bayre, whose bronze works like Tiger Surprising an Antelope (c. 1835) became popular among the ruling class.

Romanticism in England

With the exception of William Blake, who practiced a more visionary art, the English Romantic painters favored landscape. Their depictions, however, were not as dramatic and sublime as their German counterparts, but were more naturalistic. The Norwich School was a group of landscape painters that developed from the 1803 Norwich Society of Artists. John Crome, was a founding member of the group and the first president of the Norwich Society, which held annual exhibitions from 1805-1833. Working in both watercolor and oil painting, Crome, like other members of the group emphasized en plein air painting and scientific observation of the landscape. Nonetheless, his work and the work of other artists in the group reflected a Romantic sensibility, as seen in his Boys Bathing on the River Wensum, Norwich (1817), which depicts a precisely observed scene along the Wensum River yet conveys the feeling of human harmony with the sublime beauty of the area.

John Constable was the most influential of the English landscape painters, combining close observation of nature with a deep sensitivity. Rebelling against standard practices of the academy, he wrote to his friend, "For the last two years I have been running after pictures, and seeking the truth at second hand .. I have not endeavored to represent nature with the same elevation of mind with which I set out, but have rather tried to make my performances look like the work of other men .. The great vice of the present day is bravura, an attempt to do something beyond the truth." His use of color was influential on the young Eugène Delacroix, who delighted in the way Constable used dabs of local color and white to create a shimmering light. Color was most radically explored by J.M.W. Turner . Turner was a prolific, yet eccentric and reclusive, artist working in oils, watercolors, and prints. Turner's application of color in rapid strokes created an impastoed and dynamic surface that earned him the epithet "the painter of light." He would be very influential to the Impressionists in the later 19 th century and even the Abstract Expressionist Mark Rothko in the mid-20 th century.

Romanticism in the United States

American Romanticism found its primary expression in the landscape painting of the Hudson River School , between 1825-1875. While the movement began with Thomas Doughty, whose work emphasized a kind of quietism in nature, the most famous member of the group was Thomas Cole , whose landscapes convey a sense of awe at the vastness of nature. Other noted artists were Frederic Edwin Church , Asher B. Durand , and Albert Bierstadt . The works of most of these artists focused on the landscape of the Adirondacks, White Mountains, and Catskills of the Northeast but gradually branched out into the American West as well as South and Latin American landscapes. Working from sketches that they made outdoors, the artists would create the paintings later in their studios, sometimes using composites of various scenes to create an image of a somewhat imaginary location. The emphasis in such paintings was often upon awe-inspiring, dramatic vistas, where the human figure would appear to be dwarfed, and where an overwhelming and sublime sense of nature's beauty would be conveyed.

Romanticism in Architecture: The Age of Revivals

Romanticism in architecture rebelled against the Neoclassical ideals of the 18 th century primarily by evoking past styles. Styles from other periods and regions in the world were incorporated, all with the purpose of evoking feeling, whether a nostalgic longing for the past or for exotic mystery. Accordingly, architecture was dominated by "revival" styles, like the Gothic Revival and the Oriental Revival.

Though the incorporation of Gothic design began in the 1740s, the Gothic Revival became a dominant movement in the 1800s. In France, the historian Arcisse de Caumont's writing provided an intellectual foundation for the interest in antiquities, but it was Victor Hugo's novel, The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831) that popularized the neo-Gothic craze. In England The Houses of Parliament, also known as the Palace of Westminster, designed and rebuilt by A.W.N. Pugin with architect Charles Berry, exemplifies the Gothic Revival style.

The famous example of Oriental Revival style is the Royal Pavilion (1815-1822) in Brighton, England, built by the architect John Nash. The seaside home of King George IV includes onion domes and minarets and variations on crenellations in the building to create an imposing but exotic presence which includes elements of Asian and Middle-Eastern styles. Napoleon Bonaparte's campaign to Egypt inspired an interest in ancient Egyptian culture, leading to the use of Egyptian columns, obelisks, pylons, and sphinx sculptures. The detention complex "The Tombs," called originally the Houses of Justice, built in New York City in 1838 is a good example of the Egyptian substyle of the Oriental Revival.

Later Developments - After Romanticism

Romanticism began to fade at various times in different countries, but by the 1830s, with the introduction of photography and increasing industrialization and urbanization, artistic styles start trending more toward Realism .

The Pre-Raphaelites

The Romantics' return to earlier styles, such as Medieval art, greatly influenced the later 19 th -century British Pre-Raphaelites Edward Burne-Jones , Dante Gabriel Rossetti , and John Everett Millais . These artists depicted medieval, religious, and Shakespearean subject matter filtered through a Romantically-tinged naturalism. They emphasized the imagination as well as the connections between the visual arts and literature.

Turner's and Delacroix's Influence

Turner's and Delacroix's studies and uses of color as well as their vigorous brushstrokes had a significant influence on Impressionism. Their emphasis on color rather than line as a primary mode of composition particularly influenced Georges Seurat's development of Neo-Impressionism and color theory, which became a foundation for later movements like Fauvism and Orphism .

Goya's Influence

Goya's unsentimental representations of Spanish life influenced many Realist artists of the next generation, including French avant-garde painter Édouard Manet . Some of Pablo Picasso's most noted works like Guernica (1937) reflect the continuing influence of Goya on his fellow countrymen. The gruesome results of war and abjection found a new audience who had experienced their own brutal wars in the 20 th century.

William Blake's Influence

William Blake's use of image and text to convey a single vision was influential in many modern art movements; Italian Futurism , Orphism , Russian Futurism , Dada , and Surrealism all combined text and image in a variety of ways. Blake's visionary mysticism and rebelliousness also influenced the Beat generation of the 1950's, including the writer Jack Kerouac.

Caspar David Friedrich's Influence

Caspar David Friedrich's symbolic landscapes and their evocation of the sublime had lasting influence among modern artists from the Expressionist Edvard Munch , to the Surrealists Max Ernst and René Magritte , to the later Abstract Expressionists Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman . Friedrich's inspiring visualization of the German landscape was taken up by the Nazis in the 1930s to promote their ideology of Blood and Soil, which espoused racialism and a romanticized nationalism. As a result, it took many years for Friedrich's reputation to recover.

The tenets of Romanticism, emphasizing the primacy of the individual, and, within that individual, the power of the subjective imagination and feeling, became the bedrock of much of modern culture. Surrealism's emphasis on dream life and the subjective subconscious, Expressionism's emphasis on emotional intensity, and the contemporary emphasis on the artist as a cultural celebrity, all derive from Romanticism. The movement has become part of how we think about the individual, one's individual experience and its expression in art. The concept of the artist as a visionary in tune with the deeper nature of reality, which has been part of any number of avant-garde movements, is essentially a Romanticist view.

Useful Resources on Romanticism

• Delacroix: and the Rise of Modern Art Our Pick By Patrick Noon and Christopher Riopelle
• Théodore Géricault By Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer
• Romanticism: A German Affair By Rüdiger Safranski and Robert E. Goodwin
• Romanticism and Art (World of Art) Our Pick By William Vaughn
• Caspar David Friedrich By Johannes Grave
• Page on Romanticism Our Pick By Kathryn Calley Galitz / The Metropolitan Museum of Art / October 2004
• William Blake By Glasgow University Library: Special Collection Department / November 2007
• Cry Freedom: Jonathan Jones on how Delacroix captured the ecstasy of liberty Our Pick By Jonathan Jones / The Guardian / April 1, 2005
• Caspar David Friedrich at the edge of the imaginable By Julian Bell / Times Literary Supplement / October 26, 2012
• Lord Byron - A Rock Star Poet in an Age of Extravagance By Carolyn McDowall / The Culture Concept Circle / April 21, 2012

Similar Art

The Scream (1893)

Four Darks in Red (1958)

Related artists.

Related Movements & Topics

Content compiled and written by Rebecca Seiferle

Edited and revised, with Summary and Accomplishments added by Valerie Hellstein

Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History Essays

• Romanticism

Théodore Gericault

Evening: Landscape with an Aqueduct

Alfred Dedreux (1810–1860) as a Child

The Start of the Race of the Riderless Horses

Horace Vernet

Jean-Louis-André-Théodore Gericault (1791–1824)

Inundated Ruins of a Monastery

Karl Blechen

Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop's Grounds

John Constable

Eugène Delacroix

Royal Tiger

Stormy Coast Scene after a Shipwreck

French Painter

Mother and Child by the Sea

Johan Christian Dahl

The Natchez

Wanderer in the Storm

Julius von Leypold

The Abduction of Rebecca

Jewish Woman of Algiers Seated on the Ground

Théodore Chassériau

The Virgin Adoring the Host

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres

Ovid among the Scythians

Kathryn Calley Galitz Department of European Paintings, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

October 2004

Romanticism, first defined as an aesthetic in literary criticism around 1800, gained momentum as an artistic movement in France and Britain in the early decades of the nineteenth century and flourished until mid-century. With its emphasis on the imagination and emotion, Romanticism emerged as a response to the disillusionment with the Enlightenment values of reason and order in the aftermath of the French Revolution of 1789. Though often posited in opposition to Neoclassicism , early Romanticism was shaped largely by artists trained in Jacques Louis David’s studio, including Baron Antoine Jean Gros, Anne Louis Girodet-Trioson, and Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres. This blurring of stylistic boundaries is best expressed in Ingres’ Apotheosis of Homer and Eugène Delacroix’s Death of Sardanapalus (both Museé du Louvre, Paris), which polarized the public at the Salon of 1827 in Paris. While Ingres’ work seemingly embodied the ordered classicism of David in contrast to the disorder and tumult of Delacroix, in fact both works draw from the Davidian tradition but each ultimately subverts that model, asserting the originality of the artist—a central notion of Romanticism.

In Romantic art, nature—with its uncontrollable power, unpredictability, and potential for cataclysmic extremes—offered an alternative to the ordered world of Enlightenment thought. The violent and terrifying images of nature conjured by Romantic artists recall the eighteenth-century aesthetic of the Sublime. As articulated by the British statesman Edmund Burke in a 1757 treatise and echoed by the French philosopher Denis Diderot a decade later, “all that stuns the soul, all that imprints a feeling of terror, leads to the sublime.” In French and British painting of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the recurrence of images of shipwrecks ( 2003.42.56 ) and other representations of man’s struggle against the awesome power of nature manifest this sensibility. Scenes of shipwrecks culminated in 1819 with Théodore Gericault’s strikingly original Raft of the Medusa (Louvre), based on a contemporary event. In its horrifying explicitness, emotional intensity, and conspicuous lack of a hero, The Raft of the Medusa became an icon of the emerging Romantic style. Similarly, J. M. W. Turner’s 1812 depiction of Hannibal and his army crossing the Alps (Tate, London), in which the general and his troops are dwarfed by the overwhelming scale of the landscape and engulfed in the swirling vortex of snow, embodies the Romantic sensibility in landscape painting. Gericault also explored the Romantic landscape in a series of views representing different times of day; in Evening: Landscape with an Aqueduct ( 1989.183 ), the dramatic sky, blasted tree, and classical ruins evoke a sense of melancholic reverie.

Another facet of the Romantic attitude toward nature emerges in the landscapes of John Constable , whose art expresses his response to his native English countryside. For his major paintings, Constable executed full-scale sketches, as in a view of Salisbury Cathedral ( 50.145.8 ); he wrote that a sketch represents “nothing but one state of mind—that which you were in at the time.” When his landscapes were exhibited in Paris at the Salon of 1824, critics and artists embraced his art as “nature itself.” Constable’s subjective, highly personal view of nature accords with the individuality that is a central tenet of Romanticism.

This interest in the individual and subjective—at odds with eighteenth-century rationalism—is mirrored in the Romantic approach to portraiture. Traditionally, records of individual likeness, portraits became vehicles for expressing a range of psychological and emotional states in the hands of Romantic painters. Gericault probed the extremes of mental illness in his portraits of psychiatric patients, as well as the darker side of childhood in his unconventional portrayals of children. In his portrait of Alfred Dedreux ( 41.17 ), a young boy of about five or six, the child appears intensely serious, more adult than childlike, while the dark clouds in the background convey an unsettling, ominous quality.

Such explorations of emotional states extended into the animal kingdom, marking the Romantic fascination with animals as both forces of nature and metaphors for human behavior. This curiosity is manifest in the sketches of wild animals done in the menageries of Paris and London in the 1820s by artists such as Delacroix, Antoine-Louis Barye, and Edwin Landseer. Gericault depicted horses of all breeds—from workhorses to racehorses—in his work. Lord Byron’s 1819 tale of Mazeppa tied to a wild horse captivated Romantic artists from Delacroix to Théodore Chassériau, who exploited the violence and passion inherent in the story. Similarly, Horace Vernet, who exhibited two scenes from Mazeppa in the Salon of 1827 (both Musée Calvet, Avignon), also painted the riderless horse race that marked the end of the Roman Carnival, which he witnessed during his 1820 visit to Rome. His oil sketch ( 87.15.47 ) captures the frenetic energy of the spectacle, just before the start of the race. Images of wild, unbridled animals evoked primal states that stirred the Romantic imagination.

Along with plumbing emotional and behavioral extremes, Romantic artists expanded the repertoire of subject matter, rejecting the didacticism of Neoclassical history painting in favor of imaginary and exotic subjects. Orientalism and the worlds of literature stimulated new dialogues with the past as well as the present. Ingres’ sinuous odalisques ( 38.65 ) reflect the contemporary fascination with the exoticism of the harem, albeit a purely imagined Orient, as he never traveled beyond Italy. In 1832, Delacroix journeyed to Morocco, and his trip to North Africa prompted other artists to follow. In 1846, Chassériau documented his visit to Algeria in notebooks filled with watercolors and drawings, which later served as models for paintings done in his Paris studio ( 64.188 ). Literature offered an alternative form of escapism. The novels of Sir Walter Scott, the poetry of Lord Byron, and the drama of Shakespeare transported art to other worlds and eras. Medieval England is the setting of Delacroix’s tumultuous Abduction of Rebecca ( 03.30 ), which illustrates an episode from Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe .

In its stylistic diversity and range of subjects, Romanticism defies simple categorization. As the poet and critic Charles Baudelaire wrote in 1846, “Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject nor in exact truth, but in a way of feeling.”

Galitz, Kathryn Calley. “Romanticism.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History . New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/roma/hd_roma.htm (October 2004)

Further Reading

Brookner, Anita. Romanticism and Its Discontents . New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux; : , 2000.

Honour, Hugh. Romanticism . New York: Harper & Row, 1979.

Additional Essays by Kathryn Calley Galitz

• Galitz, Kathryn Calley. “ The Legacy of Jacques Louis David (1748–1825) .” (October 2004)
• Galitz, Kathryn Calley. “ Gustave Courbet (1819–1877) .” (May 2009)
• Galitz, Kathryn Calley. “ The French Academy in Rome .” (October 2003)

Related Essays

• John Constable (1776–1837)
• Poets, Lovers, and Heroes in Italian Mythological Prints
• The Salon and the Royal Academy in the Nineteenth Century
• The Transformation of Landscape Painting in France
• Watercolor Painting in Britain, 1750–1850
• The Aesthetic of the Sketch in Nineteenth-Century France
• Auguste Rodin (1840–1917)
• The Countess da Castiglione
• Gustave Courbet (1819–1877)
• James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903) as Etcher
• The Legacy of Jacques Louis David (1748–1825)
• Lithography in the Nineteenth Century
• The Nabis and Decorative Painting
• Nadar (1820–1910)
• Nineteenth-Century Classical Music
• Nineteenth-Century French Realism
• Orientalism in Nineteenth-Century Art
• Paolo Veronese (1528–1588)
• The Pre-Raphaelites
• Shakespeare and Art, 1709–1922
• Shakespeare Portrayed
• Sixteenth-Century Painting in Venice and the Veneto
• Thomas Eakins (1844–1916): Painting
• Women Artists in Nineteenth-Century France
• France, 1800–1900 A.D.
• Great Britain and Ireland, 1800–1900 A.D.
• 19th Century A.D.
• Architecture
• British Literature / Poetry
• Classical Ruins
• French Literature / Poetry
• Great Britain and Ireland
• History Painting
• Literature / Poetry
• Oil on Canvas
• Orientalism
• Preparatory Study

Artist or Maker

• Adamson, Robert
• Blake, William
• Blechen, Karl
• Chassériau, Théodore
• Constable, John
• Dahl, Johan Christian
• David, Jacques Louis
• Delacroix, Eugène
• Eakins, Thomas
• Friedrich, Caspar David
• Fuseli, Henry
• Gericault, Théodore
• Girodet-Trioson, Anne-Louis
• Gros, Antoine Jean
• Ingres, Jean Auguste Dominique
• Købke, Christen
• Turner, Joseph Mallord William
• Vernet, Horace
• Von Carolsfeld, Julius Schnorr
• Von Leypold, Julius

Online Features

• 82nd & Fifth: “Motion Picture” by Asher Miller
• Connections: “Fatherhood” by Tim Healing

Romantic Literature (1820–1860)

The romantic period, 1820–1860: essayists and poets, fresh new vision electrified artistic and intellectual circles.

The Romantic movement, which originated in Germany but quickly spread to England, France, and beyond, reached America around the year 1820, some twenty 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. Yet there was an important difference: Romanticism in America coincided with the period of national expansion and the discovery of a distinctive American voice. The solidification of a national identity and the surging idealism and passion of Romanticism nurtured the masterpieces of “the American Renaissance.”

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 Romantics underscored the importance of expressive art for the individual and society. In his essay “The Poet” (1844), Ralph Waldo Emerson, perhaps the most influential writer of the Romantic era, asserts:

For all men live by truth, and stand in need of expression. In love, in art, in avarice, in politics, in labor, in games, we study to utter our painful secret. The man is only half himself, the other half is his expression.

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. If one’s self were one with all humanity, then the individual had a moral duty to reform social inequalities and relieve human suffering. 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.”

As the unique, subjective self became important, so did the realm of psychology. Exceptional artistic effects and techniques were developed to evoke heightened psychological states. The “sublime”—an effect of beauty in grandeur (for example, a view from a mountaintop)—produced feelings of awe, reverence, vastness, and a power beyond human comprehension.

Romanticism was affirmative and appropriate for most American poets and creative essayists. America’s vast mountains, deserts, and tropics embodied the sublime. The Romantic spirit seemed particularly suited to American democracy: It stressed individualism, affirmed the value of the common person, and looked to the inspired imagination for its aesthetic and ethical values. Certainly the New England Transcendentalists—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and their associates—were inspired to a new optimistic affirmation by the Romantic movement. In New England, Romanticism fell upon fertile soil.

Transcendentalism

The Transcendentalist movement was a reaction against 18th century rationalism and a manifestation of the general humanitarian trend of nineteenth century thought. The movement was based on a fundamental belief in the unity of the world and God. The soul of each individual was thought to be identical with the world—a microcosm of the world itself. The doctrine of self-reliance and individualism developed through the belief in the identification of the individual soul with God.

Transcendentalism was intimately connected with Concord, a small New England village thirty-two kilometers west of Boston. Concord was the first inland settlement of the original Massachusetts Bay Colony. Surrounded by forest, it was and remains a peaceful town close enough to Boston’s lectures, bookstores, and colleges to be intensely cultivated, but far enough away to be serene. Concord was the site of the first battle of the American Revolution, and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s poem commemorating the battle, “Concord Hymn,” has one of the most famous opening stanzas in American literature:

By the rude bridge that arched the flood Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled, Here once the embattled farmers stood And fired the shot heard round the world.

Concord was the first rural artist’s colony, and the first place to offer a spiritual and cultural alternative to American materialism. It was a place of high-minded conversation and simple living (Emerson and Henry David Thoreau both had vegetable gardens). Emerson, who moved to Concord in 1834, and Thoreau are most closely associated with the town, but the locale also attracted the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, the feminist writer Margaret Fuller, the educator (and father of novelist Louisa May Alcott) Bronson Alcott, and the poet William Ellery Channing. The Transcendental Club was loosely organized in 1836 and included, at various times, Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, Channing, Bronson Alcott, Orestes Brownson (a leading minister), Theodore Parker (abolitionist and minister), and others.

The Transcendentalists published a quarterly magazine,  The Dial , which lasted four years and was first edited by Margaret Fuller and later by Emerson. Reform efforts engaged them as well as literature. A number of Transcendentalists were abolitionists, and some were involved in experimental utopian communities such as nearby Brook Farm (described in Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance ) and Fruitlands.

Unlike many European groups, the Transcendentalists never issued a manifesto. They insisted on individual differences – on the unique viewpoint of the individual. American Transcendental Romantics pushed radical individualism to the extreme. American writers often saw themselves as lonely explorers outside society and convention. The American hero—like Herman Melville’s Captain Ahab, or Mark Twain’s Huck Finn, or Edgar Allan Poe’s Arthur Gordon Pym—typically faced risk, or even certain destruction, in the pursuit of metaphysical self-discovery. For the Romantic American writer, nothing was a given. Literary and social conventions, far from being helpful, were dangerous. There was tremendous pressure to discover an authentic literary form, content, and voice – all at the same time. It is clear from the many masterpieces produced in the three decades before the U.S. Civil War (1861–65) that American writers rose to the challenge.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the towering figure of his era, had a religious sense of mission. Although many accused him of subverting Christianity, he explained that, for him “to be a good minister, it was necessary to leave the church.” The address he delivered in 1838 at his alma mater, the Harvard Divinity School, made him unwelcome at Harvard for thirty years. In it, Emerson accused the church of acting “as if God were dead” and of emphasizing dogma while stifling the spirit.

Emerson’s philosophy has been called contradictory, and it is true that he consciously avoided building a logical intellectual system because such a rational system would have negated his Romantic belief in intuition and flexibility. In his essay “Self-Reliance,” Emerson remarks: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” Yet he is remarkably consistent in his call for the birth of American individualism inspired by nature. Most of his major ideas—the need for a new national vision, the use of personal experience, the notion of the cosmic Over-Soul, and the doctrine of compensation—are suggested in his first publication, Nature (1836). This essay opens:

Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs. Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past…? The sun shines today also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.

Emerson loved the aphoristic genius of the sixteenth-century French essayist Montaigne, and he once told Bronson Alcott that he wanted to write a book like Montaigne’s, “full of fun, poetry, business, divinity, philosophy, anecdotes, smut.” He complained that Alcott’s abstract style omitted “the light that shines on a man’s hat, in a child’s spoon.”

Spiritual vision and practical, aphoristic expression make Emerson exhilarating; one of the Concord Transcendentalists aptly compared listening to him with “going to heaven in a swing.” Much of his spiritual insight comes from his readings in Eastern religion, especially Hinduism, Confucianism, and Islamic Sufism. For example, his poem “Brahma” relies on Hindu sources to assert a cosmic order beyond the limited perception of mortals:

If the red slayer think he slay Or the slain think he is slain, They know not well the subtle ways I keep, and pass, and turn again. Far or forgot to me is near Shadow and sunlight are the same; The vanished gods to me appear; And one to me are shame and fame. They reckon ill who leave me out; When me they fly, I am the wings; I am the doubter and the doubt, And I the hymn the Brahmin sings The strong gods pine for my abode, And pine in vain the sacred Seven, But thou, meek lover of the good! Find me, and turn thy back on heaven.

This poem, published in the first number of the  Atlantic Monthly magazine (1857), confused readers unfamiliar with Brahma, the highest Hindu god, the eternal and infinite soul of the universe. Emerson had this advice for his readers: “Tell them to say Jehovah instead of Brahma.”

The British critic Matthew Arnold said the most important writings in English in the nineteenth century had been Wordsworth’s poems and Emerson’s essays. A great prose-poet, Emerson influenced a long line of American poets, including Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, and Robert Frost. He is also credited with influencing the philosophies of John Dewey, George Santayana, Friedrich Nietzsche, and William James.

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

Henry David Thoreau, of French and Scottish descent, was born in Concord and made it his permanent home. From a poor family, like Emerson, he worked his way through Harvard. Throughout his life, he reduced his needs to the simplest level and managed to live on very little money, thus maintaining his independence. In essence, he made living his career. A nonconformist, he attempted to live his life at all times according to his rigorous principles. This attempt was the subject of many of his writings.

Thoreau’s masterpiece,  Walden , or Life in the Woods (1854), is the result of two years, two months, and two days (from 1845 to 1847) he spent living in a cabin he built at Walden Pond on property owned by Emerson. In Walden , Thoreau consciously shapes this time into one year, and the book is carefully constructed so the seasons are subtly evoked in order. The book also is organized so that the simplest earthly concerns come first (in the section called “Economy,” he describes the expenses of building a cabin); by the ending, the book has progressed to meditations on the stars.

In  Walden , Thoreau, a lover of travel books and the author of several, gives us an anti-travel book that paradoxically opens the inner frontier of self-discovery as no American book had up to this time. As deceptively modest as Thoreau’s ascetic life, it is no less than a guide to living the classical ideal of the good life. Both poetry and philosophy, this long poetic essay challenges the reader to examine his or her life and live it authentically. The building of the cabin, described in great detail, is a concrete metaphor for the careful building of a soul. In his journal for January 30, 1852, Thoreau explains his preference for living rooted in one place: “I am afraid to travel much or to famous places, lest it might completely dissipate the mind.”

Thoreau’s method of retreat and concentration resembles Asian meditation techniques. The resemblance is not accidental: like Emerson and Whitman, he was influenced by Hindu and Buddhist philosophy. His most treasured possession was his library of Asian classics, which he shared with Emerson. His eclectic style draws on Greek and Latin classics and is crystalline, punning, and as richly metaphorical as the English metaphysical writers of the late Renaissance.

In Walden , Thoreau not only tests the theories of Transcendentalism, he reenacts the collective American experience of the nineteenth century: living on the frontier. Thoreau felt that his contribution would be to renew a sense of the wilderness in language. His journal has an undated entry from 1851:

English literature from the days of the minstrels to the Lake Poets, Chaucer and Spenser and Shakespeare and Milton included, breathes no quite fresh and in this sense, wild strain. It is an essentially tame and civilized literature, reflecting Greece and Rome. Her wilderness is a greenwood, her wildman a Robin Hood. There is plenty of genial love of nature in her poets, but not so much of nature herself. Her chronicles inform us when her wild animals, but not the wildman in her, became extinct. There was need of America.

Walden inspired William Butler Yeats, a passionate Irish nationalist, to write “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” while Thoreau’s essay “Civil Disobedience,” with its theory of passive resistance based on the moral necessity for the just individual to disobey unjust laws, was an inspiration for Mahatma Gandhi’s Indian independence movement and Martin Luther King’s struggle for black Americans’ civil rights in the twentieth century.

Thoreau is the most attractive of the Transcendentalists today because of his ecological consciousness, do-it-yourself independence, ethical commitment to abolitionism, and political theory of civil disobedience and peaceful resistance. His ideas are still fresh, and his incisive poetic style and habit of close observation are still modern.

Walt Whitman (1819–1892)

Born on Long Island, New York, Walt Whitman was a part-time carpenter and man of the people, whose brilliant, innovative work expressed the country’s democratic spirit. Whitman was largely self-taught; he left school at the age of 11 to go to work, missing the sort of traditional education that made most American authors respectful imitators of the English. His  Leaves of Grass (1855), which he rewrote and revised throughout his life, contains “Song of Myself,” the most stunningly original poem ever written by an American. The enthusiastic praise that Emerson and a few others heaped on this daring volume confirmed Whitman in his poetic vocation, although the book was not a popular success.

A visionary book celebrating all creation,  Leaves of Grass was inspired largely by Emerson’s writings, especially his essay “The Poet,” which predicted a robust, open-hearted, universal kind of poet uncannily like Whitman himself. The poem’s innovative, unrhymed, free-verse form, open celebration of sexuality, vibrant democratic sensibility, and extreme Romantic assertion that the poet’s self was one with the poem, the universe, and the reader permanently altered the course of American poetry.

Leaves of Grass is as vast, energetic, and natural as the American continent; it was the epic generations of American critics had been calling for, although they did not recognize it. Movement ripples through “Song of Myself” like restless music:

My ties and ballasts leave me . . . I skirt sierras, my palms cover continents I am afoot with my vision.

The poem bulges with myriad concrete sights and sounds. Whitman’s birds are not the conventional “winged spirits” of poetry. His “yellow-crown’d heron comes to the edge of the marsh at night and feeds upon small crabs.” Whitman seems to project himself into everything that he sees or imagines. He is mass man, “Voyaging to every port to dicker and adventure, / Hurrying with the modern crowd as eager and fickle as any.” But he is equally the suffering individual, “The mother of old, condemn’d for a witch, burnt with dry wood, her children gazing on….I am the hounded slave, I wince at the bite of the dogs….I am the mash’d fireman with breast-bone broken….”

More than any other writer, Whitman invented the myth of democratic America. “The Americans of all nations at any time upon the earth have probably the fullest poetical nature. The United States is essentially the greatest poem.” When Whitman wrote this, he daringly turned upside down the general opinion that America was too brash and new to be poetic. He invented a timeless America of the free imagination, peopled with pioneering spirits of all nations. D.H. Lawrence, the British novelist and poet, accurately called him the poet of the “open road.”

Whitman’s greatness is visible in many of his poems, among them “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” and “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” a moving elegy on the death of Abraham Lincoln. Another important work is his long essay “Democratic Vistas” (1871), written during the unrestrained materialism of industrialism’s “Gilded Age.” In this essay, Whitman justly criticizes America for its “mighty, many-threaded wealth and industry” that mask an underlying “dry and flat Sahara” of soul. He calls for a new kind of literature to revive the American population (“Not the book needs so much to be the complete thing, but the reader of the book does”). Yet ultimately, Whitman’s main claim to immortality lies in “Song of Myself.” Here he places the Romantic self at the center of the consciousness of the poem:

I celebrate myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

Whitman’s voice electrifies even modern readers with his proclamation of the unity and vital force of all creation. He was enormously innovative. From him spring the poem as autobiography, the American Everyman as bard, the reader as creator, and the still-contemporary discovery of “experimental,” or organic, form.

The Brahmin Poets

In their time, the Boston Brahmins (as the patrician, Harvard-educated class came to be called) supplied the most respected and genuinely cultivated literary arbiters of the United States. Their lives fitted a pleasant pattern of wealth and leisure directed by the strong New England work ethic and respect for learning.

In an earlier Puritan age, the Boston Brahmins would have been ministers; in the nineteenth century, they became professors, often at Harvard. Late in life they sometimes became ambassadors or received honorary degrees from European institutions. Most of them travelled or were educated in Europe: They were familiar with the ideas and books of Britain, Germany, and France, and often Italy and Spain. Upper class in background but democratic in sympathy, the Brahmin poets carried their genteel, European-oriented views to every section of the United States, through public lectures at the three thousand lyceums (centers for public lectures) and in the pages of two influential Boston magazines, the  North American Review and the Atlantic Monthly .

The writings of the Brahmin poets fused American and European traditions and sought to create a continuity of shared Atlantic experience. These scholar-poets attempted to educate and elevate the general populace by introducing a European dimension to American literature. Ironically, their overall effect was conservative. By insisting on European things and forms, they retarded the growth of a distinctive American consciousness. Well-meaning men, their conservative backgrounds blinded them to the daring innovativeness of Thoreau, Whitman (whom they refused to meet socially), and Edgar Allan Poe (whom even Emerson regarded as the “jingle man”). They were pillars of what was called the “genteel tradition” that three generations of American realists had to battle. Partly because of their benign but bland influence, it was almost one hundred years before the distinctive American genius of Whitman, Melville, Thoreau, and Poe was generally recognized in the United States.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882)

The most important Boston Brahmin poets were Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and James Russell Lowell. Longfellow, professor of modern languages at Harvard, was the best-known American poet of his day. He was responsible for the misty, ahistorical, legendary sense of the past that merged American and European traditions. He wrote three long narrative poems popularizing native legends in European meters “Evangeline” (1847), “The Song of Hiawatha” (1855), and “The Courtship of Miles Standish” (1858).

Longfellow also wrote textbooks on modern languages and a travel book entitled  Outre-Mer , retelling foreign legends and patterned after Washington Irving’s Sketch Book . Although conventionality, sentimentality, and facile handling mar the long poems, haunting short lyrics like “The Jewish Cemetery at Newport” (1854), “My Lost Youth” (1855), and “The Tide Rises, The Tide Falls” (1880) continue to give pleasure.

James Russell Lowell (1819–1891)

James Russell Lowell, who became professor of modern languages at Harvard after Longfellow retired, is the Matthew Arnold of American literature. He began as a poet but gradually lost his poetic ability, ending as a respected critic and educator. As editor of the  Atlantic and co-editor of the North American Review , Lowell exercised enormous influence. Lowell’s A Fable for Critics (1848) is a funny and apt appraisal of American writers, as in his comment: “There comes Poe, with his raven, like Barnaby Rudge / Three-fifths of him genius and two-fifths sheer fudge.”

Under his wife’s influence, Lowell became a liberal reformer, abolitionist, and supporter of women’s suffrage and laws ending child labor. His  Biglow  Papers, First Series (1847–48) creates Hosea Biglow, a shrewd but uneducated village poet who argues for reform in dialect poetry. Benjamin Franklin and Phillip Freneau had used intelligent villagers as mouthpieces for social commentary. Lowell writes in the same vein, linking the colonial “character” tradition with the new realism and regionalism based on dialect that flowered in the 1850s and came to fruition in Mark Twain.

Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–1894)

Oliver Wendell Holmes, a celebrated physician and professor of anatomy and physiology at Harvard, is the hardest of the three well-known Brahmins to categorize because his work is marked by a refreshing versatility. It encompasses collections of humorous essays (for example, The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table , 1858), novels ( Elsie Venner , 1861), biographies ( Ralph Waldo Emerson , 1885), and verse that could be sprightly (“The Deacon’s Masterpiece, or, The Wonderful One-Hoss Shay”), philosophical (“The Chambered Nautilus”), or fervently patriotic (“Old Ironsides”).

Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the suburb of Boston that is home to Harvard, Holmes was the son of a prominent local minister. His mother was a descendant of the poet Anne Bradstreet. In his time, and more so thereafter, he symbolized wit, intelligence, and charm not as a discoverer or a trailblazer, but rather as an exemplary interpreter of everything from society and language to medicine and human nature.

Two Reformers

New England sparkled with intellectual energy in the years before the Civil War. Some of the stars that shine more brightly today than the famous constellation of Brahmins were dimmed by poverty or accidents of gender or race in their own time. Modern readers increasingly value the work of abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier and feminist and social reformer Margaret Fuller.

John Greenleaf Whittier (1807–1892)

John Greenleaf Whittier, the most active poet of the era, had a background very similar to Walt Whitman’s. He was born and raised on a modest Quaker farm in Massachusetts, had little formal education, and worked as a journalist. For decades before it became popular, he was an ardent abolitionist. Whittier is respected for anti-slavery poems such as “Ichabod,” and his poetry is sometimes viewed as an early example of regional realism.

Whittier’s sharp images, simple constructions, and ballad-like tetrameter couplets have the simple earthy texture of Robert Burns. His best work, the long poem “Snow Bound,” vividly recreates the poet’s deceased family members and friends as he remembers them from childhood, huddled cozily around the blazing hearth during one of New England’s blustering snowstorms. This simple, religious, intensely personal poem, coming after the long nightmare of the Civil War, is an elegy for the dead and a healing hymn. It affirms the eternity of the spirit, the timeless power of love in the memory, and the undiminished beauty of nature, despite violent outer political storms.

Margaret Fuller (1810–1850)

Margaret Fuller, an outstanding essayist, was born and raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts. From a modest financial background, she was educated at home by her father (women were not allowed to attend Harvard) and became a child prodigy in the classics and modern literatures. Her special passion was German Romantic literature, especially Goethe, whom she translated.

The first professional woman journalist of note in America, Fuller wrote influential book reviews and reports on social issues such as the treatment of women prisoners and the insane. Some of these essays were published in her book  Papers on Literature and Art (1846). A year earlier, she had her most significant book, Woman in the Nineteenth Century . It originally had appeared in the Transcendentalist magazine, The Dial , which she edited from 1840 to 1842.

Fuller’s  Woman in the Nineteenth Century is the earliest and most American exploration of women’s role in society. Often applying democratic and Transcendental principles, Fuller thoughtfully analyzes the numerous subtle causes and evil consequences of sexual discrimination and suggests positive steps to be taken. Many of her ideas are strikingly modern. She stresses the importance of “self-dependence,” which women lack because “they are taught to learn their rule from without, not to unfold it from within.”

Fuller is finally not a feminist so much as an activist and reformer dedicated to the cause of creative human freedom and dignity for all:

. . . Let us be wise and not impede the soul. . . . Let us have one creative energy. . . .Let it take what form it will, and let us not bind it by the past to man or woman, black or white.

Emily Dickinson (1830–1886)

Emily Dickinson is, in a sense, a link between her era and the literary sensitivities of the turn of the century. A radical individualist, she was born and spent her life in Amherst, Massachusetts, a small Calvinist village. She never married, and she led an unconventional life that was outwardly uneventful but was full of inner intensity. She loved nature and found deep inspiration in the birds, animals, plants, and changing seasons of the New England countryside.

Dickinson spent the latter part of her life as a recluse, due to an extremely sensitive psyche and possibly to make time for writing (for stretches of time she wrote about one poem a day). Her day also included homemaking for her attorney father, a prominent figure in Amherst who became a member of Congress.

Dickinson was not widely read, but knew the Bible, the works of William Shakespeare, and works of classical mythology in great depth. These were her true teachers, for Dickinson was certainly the most solitary literary figure of her time. That this shy, withdrawn, village woman, almost unpublished and unknown, created some of the greatest American poetry of the nineteenth century has fascinated the public since the 1950s, when her poetry was rediscovered.

Dickinson’s terse, frequently imagistic style is even more modern and innovative than Whitman’s. She never uses two words when one will do, and combines concrete things with abstract ideas in an almost proverbial, compressed style. Her best poems have no fat; many mock current sentimentality, and some are even heretical. She sometimes shows a terrifying existential awareness. Like Poe, she explores the dark and hidden part of the mind, dramatizing death and the grave. Yet she also celebrated simple objects – a flower, a bee. Her poetry exhibits great intelligence and often evokes the agonizing paradox of the limits of the human consciousness trapped in time. She had an excellent sense of humor, and her range of subjects and treatment is amazingly wide. Her poems are generally known by the numbers assigned them in Thomas H. Johnson’s standard edition of 1955. They bristle with odd capitalizations and dashes.

A nonconformist, like Thoreau she often reversed meanings of words and phrases and used paradox to great effect. From 435:

Much Madness is divinest sense – To a discerning Eye – Much Sense – the starkest Madness – ‘Tis the Majority In this, as All, prevail – Assent – and you are sane – Demur – you’re straightway dangerous And handled with a chain –

Her wit shines in the following poem (288), which ridicules ambition and public life:

I’m Nobody! Who are you? Are you – Nobody – Too? Then there’s a pair of us? Don’t tell! they’d advertise – you know! How dreary – to be – Somebody! How public – like a Frog – To tell one’s name – the livelong June – To an admiring Bog!

Dickinson’s 1,775 poems continue to intrigue critics, who often disagree about them. Some stress her mystical side, some her sensitivity to nature; many note her odd, exotic appeal. One modern critic, R. P. Blackmur, comments that Dickinson’s poetry sometimes feels as if “a cat came at us speaking English.” Her clean, clear, chiseled poems are some of the most fascinating and challenging in American literature.

• The Romantic Period, 1820-1860: Essayists and Poets. From Outline of American Literature. Authored by : Katherine VanSpanckeren. Located at : http://www.saylor.org/site/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/ENGL405-1.1.1-The-Romantic-Period-1820-to-1860-Essayists-and-Poets.pdf . License : Public Domain: No Known Copyright

Romanticism

In Romanticism, humanity confronted its fears and proclivity for violence.

c. 1800–1848 C.E.

Beginner's guide

Romanticism has nothing to do with a candlelight dinner for two — learn why.

• A beginner's guide to Romanticism
• Orientalism

Romanticism by country

• View all content

In France, Romanticism often took the form of political critique — on a monumental scale

Romanticism in France, an introduction

Gros, Napoleon Bonaparte Visiting the Pest House in Jaffa

Ingres, La Grande Odalisque

Géricault, Raft of the Medusa

Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People

Francisco Goya confronted demons of all types in his paintings and prints.

Goya, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters

Goya, The Family of Charles IV

Goya, And there's nothing to be done from The Disasters of War

Goya, The Third of May, 1808

Goya, Saturn Devouring One Of His Sons

The industrial revolution in England changed everything — including its art.

Fuseli, The Nightmare

Blake, The spiritual form of Nelson guiding Leviathan

Constable, The Hay Wain

Turner, The Fighting Temeraire

Turner, Rain, Steam, and Speed—The Great Western Railway

In Germany, Caspar David Friedrich replaced angels and saints with mountains and ruins, as a way to retrieve the spiritual for the modern world.

Friedrich, Monk by the Sea

Friedrich, Abbey in the Oak Forest

Friedrich, Solitary Tree (or Lone Tree)

Friedrich, Woman at a Window

All content | romanticism.

Artists across Europe made human emotion and experience their subject.

J.M.W. Turner, Snowstorm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps

Baron Antoine-Jean Gros, Napoleon Bonaparte Visiting the Pest House in Jaffa

Théodore Géricault, Raft of the Medusa

Runge, Hülsenbeck Children

Enrique Chagoya on Goya’s Los Caprichos

Staging the Egyptian Harem for Western Eyes

Romanticism in France

John Constable, The Hay Wain

J.M.W. Turner at Tate Britain

William Blake, The Parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins

J. M. W. Turner, The Harbor of Dieppe

John Constable, View on the Stour near Dedham

Selected contributors.

Dr. Claire Black McCoy

Dr. Abram Fox

Lori Landay

Michael John Partington

Dr. Noelle Paulson

Dr. Joyce C. Polistena

Ben Pollitt

Sarah C. Schaefer

Christine Zappella

Dr. Bryan Zygmont

Your donations help make art history free and accessible to everyone!

Romanticism in Literature: Definition and Examples

Finding beauty in nature and the common man.

Apic / Getty Images

• Authors & Texts
• Top Picks Lists
• Study Guides
• Best Sellers
• Plays & Drama
• Shakespeare
• Short Stories
• Children's Books

• B.A., English, Rutgers University

Romanticism was a literary movement that began in the late 18th century, ending around the middle of the 19th century—although its influence continues to this day. Marked by a focus on the individual (and the unique perspective of a person, often guided by irrational, emotional impulses), a respect for nature and the primitive, and a celebration of the common man, Romanticism can be seen as a reaction to the huge changes in society that occurred during this period, including the revolutions that burned through countries like France and the United States, ushering in grand experiments in democracy.

Key Takeaways: Romanticism in Literature

• Romanticism is a literary movement spanning roughly 1790–1850.
• The movement was characterized by a celebration of nature and the common man, a focus on individual experience, an idealization of women, and an embrace of isolation and melancholy.
• Prominent Romantic writers include John Keats, William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Mary Shelley.

Romanticism Definition

The term Romanticism does not stem directly from the concept of love, but rather from the French word romaunt (a romantic story told in verse). Romanticism focused on emotions and the inner life of the writer, and often used autobiographical material to inform the work or even provide a template for it, unlike traditional literature at the time.

Romanticism celebrated the primitive and elevated "regular people" as being deserving of celebration, which was an innovation at the time. Romanticism also fixated on nature as a primordial force and encouraged the concept of isolation as necessary for spiritual and artistic development.

Characteristics of Romanticism

Romantic literature is marked by six primary characteristics: celebration of nature, focus on the individual and spirituality, celebration of isolation and melancholy, interest in the common man, idealization of women, and personification and pathetic fallacy.

Celebration of Nature

Romantic writers saw nature as a teacher and a source of infinite beauty. One of the most famous works of Romanticism is John Keats’ To Autumn (1820):

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they? Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,– While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day, And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue; Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn Among the river sallows, borne aloft Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;

Keats personifies the season and follows its progression from the initial arrival after summer, through the harvest season, and finally to autumn’s end as winter takes its place.

Focus on the Individual and Spirituality

Romantic writers turned inward, valuing the individual experience above all else. This in turn led to heightened sense of spirituality in Romantic work, and the addition of occult and supernatural elements.

The work of Edgar Allan Poe exemplifies this aspect of the movement; for example, The Raven tells the story of a man grieving for his dead love (an idealized woman in the Romantic tradition) when a seemingly sentient Raven arrives and torments him, which can be interpreted literally or seen as a manifestation of his mental instability.

Celebration of Isolation and Melancholy

Ralph Waldo Emerson was a very influential writer in Romanticism; his books of essays explored many of the themes of the literary movement and codified them. His 1841 essay Self-Reliance is a seminal work of Romantic writing in which he exhorts the value of looking inward and determining your own path, and relying on only your own resources.

Related to the insistence on isolation, melancholy is a key feature of many works of Romanticism, usually seen as a reaction to inevitable failure—writers wished to express the pure beauty they perceived and failure to do so adequately resulted in despair like the sort expressed by Percy Bysshe Shelley in A Lament :

O world! O life! O time! On whose last steps I climb. Trembling at that where I had stood before; When will return the glory of your prime? No more—Oh, never more!

Interest in the Common Man

William Wordsworth was one of the first poets to embrace the concept of writing that could be read, enjoyed, and understood by anyone. He eschewed overly stylized language and references to classical works in favor of emotional imagery conveyed in simple, elegant language, as in his most famous poem I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud :

I wandered lonely as a Cloud That floats on high o'er vales and Hills, When all at once I saw a crowd, A host, of golden Daffodils; Beside the Lake, beneath the trees, Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Idealization of Women

In works such as Poe’s The Raven , women were always presented as idealized love interests, pure and beautiful, but usually without anything else to offer. Ironically, the most notable novels of the period were written by women (Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and Mary Shelley, for example), but had to be initially published under male pseudonyms because of these attitudes. Much Romantic literature is infused with the concept of women being perfect innocent beings to be adored, mourned, and respected—but never touched or relied upon.

Personification and Pathetic Fallacy

Romantic literature’s fixation on nature is characterized by the heavy use of both personification and pathetic fallacy. Mary Shelley used these techniques to great effect in Frankenstein :

Its fair lakes reflect a blue and gentle sky; and, when troubled by the winds, their tumult is but as the play of a lively infant, when compared to the roarings of the giant ocean.

Romanticism continues to influence literature today; Stephenie Meyers’ Twilight novels are clear descendants of the movement, incorporating most of the characteristics of classic Romanticism despite being published a century and half after the end of the movement’s active life.

• The Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica. “Romanticism.” Encyclopedia Britannica, Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 19 Nov. 2019, https://www.britannica.com/art/Romanticism.
• Parker, James. “A Book That Examines the Writing Processes of Two Poetry Giants.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 23 July 2019, https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2019/07/how-two-literary-giants-wrote-their-best-poetry/594514/.
• Alhathani, Safa. “EN571: Literature & Technology.” EN571 Literature Technology, 13 May 2018, https://commons.marymount.edu/571sp17/2018/05/13/analysis-of-romanticism-in-frankenstein-through-digital-tools/.
• “William Wordsworth.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/william-wordsworth.
• An Introduction to the Romantic Period
• Biography of Mary Shelley, English Novelist, Author of 'Frankenstein'
• William Wordsworth's 'Daffodils' Poem
• A Classic Collection of Bird Poems
• 7 Poems That Evoke Autumn
• 'Frankenstein' Overview
• Romanticism in Art History From 1800-1880
• 14 Classic Poems Everyone Should Know
• Personification
• Biography of John Keats, English Romantic Poet
• A Brief Overview of British Literary Periods
• Poems of Protest and Revolution
• Biography of Lord Byron, English Poet and Aristocrat
• Frankenstein Themes, Symbols, and Literary Devices
• What Was the Main Goal of Mary Wollstonecraft's Advocacy?
• Transcendentalism in American History

• Shelley's Poems

Percy Bysshe Shelley

• Literature Notes
• Understanding the Romantic Period
• Percy Bysshe Shelley Biography
• Summary and Analysis
• Hymn to Intellectual Beauty
• Stanzas Written in Dejection near Naples
• Sonnet: England in 1819
• Ode to the West Wind
• To a Skylark
• Critical Essay
• Essay Questions
• Cite this Literature Note

Critical Essay Understanding the Romantic Period

The romantic period is a term applied to the literature of approximately the first third of the nineteenth century. During this time, literature began to move in channels that were not entirely new but were in strong contrast to the standard literary practice of the eighteenth century.

How the word romantic came to be applied to this period is something of a puzzle. Originally the word was applied to the Latin or Roman dialects used in the Roman provinces, especially France, and to the stories written in these dialects. Romantic is a derivative of romant, which was borrowed from the French romaunt in the sixteenth century. At first it meant only "like the old romances" but gradually it began to carry a certain taint. Romantic, according to L. P. Smith in his Words and Idioms , connoted "false and fictitious beings and feelings, without real existence in fact or in human nature"; it also suggested "old castles, mountains and forests, pastoral plains, waste and solitary places" and a "love for wild nature, for mountains and moors."

The word passed from England to France and Germany late in the seventeenth century and became a critical term for certain poets who scorned and rejected the models of the past; they prided themselves on their freedom from eighteenth-century poetic codes. In Germany, especially, the word was used in strong opposition to the term classical.

The grouping together of the so-called Lake poets (Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey) with Scott, Byron, Keats, and Shelley as the romantic poets is late Victorian, apparently as late as the middle 1880s. And it should be noted that these poets did not recognize themselves as "romantic," although they were familiar with the word and recognized that their practice differed from that of the eighteenth century.

According to René Wellek in his essay "The Concept of Romanticism" ( Comparative Literature , Volume I), the widespread application of the word romantic to these writers was probably owing to Alois Brandl's Coleridge und die romantische Schule in England ( Coleridge and the Romantic School in England, translated into English in 1887) and to Walter Pater's essay "Romanticism" in his Appreciations in 1889.

The reaction to the standard literary practice and critical norms of the eighteenth century occurred in many areas and in varying degrees. Reason no longer held the high place it had held in the eighteenth century; its place was taken by imagination, emotion, and individual sensibility. The eccentric and the singular took the place of the accepted conventions of the age. A concentration on the individual and the minute replaced the eighteenth-century insistence on the universal and the general. Individualism replaced objective subject matter; probably at no other time has the writer used himself as the subject of his literary works to such an extent as during the romantic period. Writers tended to regard themselves as the most interesting subject for literary creation; interest in urban life was replaced by an interest in nature, particularly in untamed nature and in solitude. Classical literature quickly lost the esteem which poets like Pope had given it. The romantic writers turned back to their own native traditions. The Medieval and Renaissance periods were ransacked for new subject matter and for literary genres that had fallen into disuse. The standard eighteenth-century heroic couplet was replaced by a variety of forms such as the ballad, the metrical romance, the sonnet, ottava nina, blank verse, and the Spenserian stanza, all of which were forms that had been neglected since Renaissance times. The romantic writers responded strongly to the impact of new forces, particularly the French Revolution and its promise of liberty, equality, and fraternity. The humanitarianism that had been developing during the eighteenth century was taken up enthusiastically by the romantic writers. Wordsworth, the great champion of the spiritual and moral values of physical nature, tried to show the natural dignity, goodness, and the worth of the common man.

The combination of new interests, new attitudes, and fresh forms produced a body of literature that was strikingly different from the literature of the eighteenth century, but that is not to say that the eighteenth century had no influence on the romantic movement. Practically all of the seeds of the new literary crop had been sown in the preceding century.

The romantic period includes the work of two generations of writers. The first generation was born during the thirty and twenty years preceding 1800; the second generation was born in the last decade of the 1800s. The chief writers of the first generation were Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Southey, Blake, Lamb, and Hazlitt. The essayist Thomas De Quincey, born in 1785, falls between the two generations.

Keats and Shelley belong to the second generation, along with Byron, who was older than they were by a few years. All three were influenced by the work of the writers of the first generation and, ironically, the careers of all three were cut short by death so that the writers of the first generation were still on the literary scene after the writers of the second generation had disappeared. The major writers of the second romantic generation were primarily poets; they produced little prose, outside of their letters. Another striking difference between the two generations is that the writers of the first generation, with the exception of Blake, all gained literary reputations during their lifetime. Of the writers of the second generation, only Byron enjoyed fame while he was alive, more fame than any of the other romantic writers, with perhaps the exception of Scott, but Keats and Shelley had relatively few readers while they were alive. It was not until the Victorian era that Keats and Shelley became recognized as major romantic poets.

Previous Adonais

Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Literary Terms and Techniques › The Sublime

The Sublime

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on February 16, 2021 • ( 2 )

The sublime is a central category of aesthetics in romanticism. It was a major topic of aesthetic theory in the 18th century, especially in England and Germany, but its inauguration as a topic was due to the translation by Nicolas Boileau (1636– 1711) of Longinus’s third-century treatise Peri Hypsos (Of elevation) into French in 1674. The word sublime is Boileau’s translation of Longinus ’s height, or elevation, and it stuck.

The beautiful had been a perennial object of aesthetic and philosophical interest, from Plato onward. But the sublime is something different, and what that difference is was interesting, first of all, to Longinus, then to Boileau, and then to the 18th-century theorists and philosophers (Edmund Burke, Hugh Blair, Immanuel Kant, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel especially) and the 19th-century poets who followed them. Boileau coined the famous phrase “je ne sais quoi” (literally, “I do not know”) to describe what made something sublime—something powerful, perhaps overwhelmingly so, but not conformable to some preexistent category, like that by which we think of beauty as harmonious (for example).

We have to distinguish between two aspects of the sublime in order to see what was novel about the modern account of it. Longinus’s treatise was about style in writing. He collected and considered passages that filled the soul with exaltation (the “elevation” of his title), passages which might interrupt the reader’s unfolding experience of the work in which they appeared to stand alone in their power. For Longinus, such passages characterized Homer especially, as in Ajax’s great prayer for light in the Iliad after the gods have suddenly blinded them with mist and darkness: “O father Zeus—draw our armies clear of the cloud, / give us a bright sky, give us back our sight! / Kill us all in the light of day at least” (17.645, translated by Fagles, treated by Longinus at 9.9). It is not for life but light that Ajax prays; Longinus compares this passage to the opening of the Book of Genesis and the creation of light as the first of things. The sublime is not a question of language, though it may be, but of greatness of soul, and so Longinus writes that “the silence of Ajax in the Underworld is great and more sublime than words” when Ajax turns away from Odysseus in the Odyssey (11.543). One definition Longinus gives, therefore, is that “Sublimity is the echo of a great soul” (9.2), and it finds an echo in its perceiver, as can be seen by how even the father of the gods, Zeus, responds to Ajax’s prayer for light, “So he prayed / and the Father filled with pity, seeing Ajax weep, / He dispelled the mist at once.” ( Iliad 17.728–730, Fagles translation) For this reason, the central hallmark of the experience of the literary sublime, and the insight most quoted from Longinus, is that it is “as if instinctively, our soul is uplifted by the true sublime; it takes a proud flight, and is filled with joy and vaunting, as though it had itself produced what it has heard” (7.2).

That elevation of soul is what obsessed the modern theorists and poets. It was an elevation that Longinus ascribed to the power of writing—that is, to the description of the world and the people in it—but that the moderns ascribed to the power of the world itself, as well as to that of writing. Ajax’s silence would be sublime in reality as well as in Homer’s invention of it. Light itself was sublime. Alexander Pope famously said that Longinus was the great sublime he drew, the critic inspired with a poet’s fire by all the muses ( Essay on Criticism , 3.675–680), a description which captures both the sense of the sublime as occurring in exalted response to what is perceived and the idea that what can be perceived is an object in the real world—Longinus himself and not just the purely textual literature that exalts its readers.

The turn to the natural sublime characterized its 18th-century theorists, most importantly Edmund Burke (1729–97). His Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) carefully distinguished between the two terms and between the aesthetic responses they elicited. The beautiful, according to Burke, produces pleasure pure and simple. The pleasure is one of the perception of harmonies. The mind perceives beautiful objects in a way that does not cause anxiety but, rather, allows it to use its faculties serenely and naturally. Beauty is a matter of smoothness, proportion, and gradation.

The sublime, on the other hand, does not procure pleasure but delight . Delight is, for Burke, by no means a synonym for pleasure. Although it is more intense than pleasure (in common parlance as well), that intensity comes from the fact that the sublime is associated with pain, danger, and anxiety, but not pleasure. The experience of the sublime is one of intense relief. It is associated with scenes like those of the Alps or the Grand Canyon because our first, instinctive response is one of fear. We perceive altitudes or depths that could kill us; then we recall that our vantage point is one of comparative safety—they could kill us, but they will not. Delight is the exalting relief that we feel: We have been overwhelmed with some vehement negative passion, and we have recovered. The thrill of the sublime is that of danger courted and overcome. It is not a positive pleasure but a more intense and delighting experience of danger survived.

The sublime is therefore associated with obscurity, fear, uncertainty, speed, and similar experiences. But how does it work in literature? For Burke, sublime literature first of all depicts scenes of sublimity and therefore shows the way (in Longinus’s terms) in which the writer’s soul has been exalted by what he or she has seen or imagined. But in a fascinating coda to the book, a section called “How Words Influence the Passions,” Longinus talks about how literature can be the origin of the sublime and not only its recorder. There is a kind of literature that defeats the reader’s imagination and threatens the psyche’s self-confidence, much as sublime natural phenomena do. For Burke, the great English writer of the sublime was John Milton, who could turn a natural description into a sublime one through the sudden and overwhelming force of his language, which defeats the r epresentational abilities of his readers but not their cognitive abilities. Burke’s example of the type of transformation that Milton makes his language undergo is a profound one: “To represent an angel in a picture, you can only draw a beautiful young man winged: but what painting can furnish out anything so grand as the addition of one word, ‘the angel of the Lord’?” Painting cannot do it, but literature can fill one with the exaltation of the unrepresentable.

Burke’s idea of the sublime overshadows the great philosophical treatment that the German philosopher Immanuel Kant gave it in The Critique of Judgment (1790). For Kant, too, the beautiful is harmonious, in particular in harmony with the mind’s perceptive faculties. But the sublime defeats those faculties, and Kant described it as occurring in a double movement. We perceive something that exceeds our powers of sensory intuition or imitative representation. We are blocked and baffled and suddenly feel ourselves to be as nothing compared to the natural world. From this sense of being overwhelmed, the mind shifts to its transcendental aspirations, its fundamental commitment not to the “empirical world” where we are very little, but to the world of our imagination, which transcends the empirical and in which our minds participate. We are awestruck by the unmeasurable power of some object in the outside world, but we have the inner resources to measure absolute magnitude or power. The world may be bewilderingly large, but it is finite; the mind can conceive of the infinite, which is its proper home. Thus, as William Wordsworth said, “Our destiny, our nature, and our home, / Is with infinitude—and only there” ( The Prelude , 1805 version, book 6, ll. 538–539) in a passage that describes his response to an experience of blockage, of being caught in a mist in his writing, much like the mist that Ajax prayed to Zeus to dissipate.

The sublime in nature sends the mind back to its own “supersensible destiny,” as Kant called it, and shows how we transcend the world that seems to trap us. The loss of power within the world leads to a gain of power in our relation to the world. This is the central and perennial theme of romanticism, to be found in all of Wordsworth’s and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s great philosophical poetry; in Percy Bysshe Shelley; and in their greatest Victorian followers, especially Robert Browning and, in America, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson. Loss leads to a perception of intensity, and that perception is what gives rise to poetry, both in the poet writing it and in the reader reading it. The intensity of the romantic sublime and its precursors, especially Milton, is one of the greatest glories of English literature.

Bibliography Bloom, Harold. Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982. Burke, Edmund. Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968. De Bolla, Peter. The Discourse of the Sublime: Readings in History, Aesthetics, and the Subject. New York: Blackwell, 1989. De Man, Paul. The Rhetoric of Romanticism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984. Hartman, Geoffrey. Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1787–1814. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1971. Hertz, Neil. The End of the Line: Essays on Psychoanalysis and the Sublime. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. Hegel, G. W. F. Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art. 2 vols. Translated by T. M. Knox. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974–75. Kant, Immanuel. The Critique of Judgment. Translated by Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis: Hackett Pub. Co., 1987. Monk, Samuel Holt. The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in XVIII-Century England. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960. Weiskel, Thomas. The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986.

Share this:

Categories: Literary Terms and Techniques , Literature , Philosophy

Tags: Edmund Burke , Immanuel Kant , Literary Criticism , Literary Theory , Longinus Sublime , On the Sublime , Poetry , Sublime aesthetics , Sublime and the romantic theory , Sublime longinus , Sublime philosophy , Sublime romanticism , Sublime theory , The Sublime

thanks, sir. very helpful..

• Terrorism and Postmodern Art – Michael Newberry

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Romanticism / Romantic Period

The Romanticism Collection highlights exemplary works from the Romantic period of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The selections in this Collection include poetry, early novels, and philosophical treatises that exemplify the movement's focus on emotions, beauty, and an appreciation of the natural world, as well as freedom and individualism.

A Complaint

By william wordsworth.

... Read A Complaint Summary

A Defence of Poetry

By percy bysshe shelley.

... Read A Defence of Poetry Summary

The death of the young has been a thematic concern in literature since Antiquity. That untimely demise not only exposes human vulnerability but makes for melancholic contemplation over the waste of beauty, confidence, and youth’s energy. And when that person is an artist, still young and learning, the implications seem more tragic. Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Adonais” (1821) is at one level a contemplation of the sudden death in 1821 of fellow poet John Keats. Keats ... Read Adonais Summary

A Dream Within a Dream

By edgar allan poe.

... Read A Dream Within a Dream Summary

All That I Owe the Fellows of the Grave

By dylan thomas.

... Read All That I Owe the Fellows of the Grave Summary

A narrow Fellow in the Grass (1096)

By emily dickinson.

... Read A narrow Fellow in the Grass (1096) Summary

A Red, Red Rose

By robert burns.

... Read A Red, Red Rose Summary

Auguries of Innocence

By william blake.

... Read Auguries of Innocence Summary

Aurora Leigh

By elizabeth barrett browning.

Written by Elizabeth Barrett Browning and first published in 1856 at the height of the Romantic Movement, Aurora Leigh is a narrative novel in blank verse that divided critics by challenging the standard positions within contemporary debates regarding class and gender. Standing at nine books and 11,000 lines, it is the first feature-length poem in English that places a female artist at the center of the plot, and as such, it catapulted its equally atypical ... Read Aurora Leigh Summary

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

By mary wollstonecraft.

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects was written in 1792 by Mary Wollstonecraft. It is often referred to as one of the earliest feminist texts, and Wollstonecraft herself described it as proto-feminist. In it, Wollstonecraft explores the oppression of women by men, and argues that no society can be either virtuous or moral while half of the population are being subjugated by the other half. Ultimately, Wollstonecraft ... Read A Vindication of the Rights of Woman Summary

Because I Could Not Stop for Death

Emily Dickinson holds a special place in the firmament of American writers. Although she lived in the 19th century and seldom left her home region in Massachusetts, her poetry speaks to readers of all ages and backgrounds. Dickinson possessed a singular poetic style, characterized by inventive punctuation, powerful efficiency, and deep inquiry of the human experience. Her poem “Because I could not stop for Death” has become a touchstone for readers encountering Dickinson for the ... Read Because I Could Not Stop for Death Summary

Biographia Literaria

By samuel taylor coleridge.

The Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge published Biographia Literaria, his semiautobiographical work on aesthetic theory, in 1817. Charting the history of his literary career and melding amusing autobiographical anecdotes with what Coleridge calls “transcendental philosophy” (91), the text is an influential work of literary criticism. Capturing Coleridge’s political ideas about the French Revolution and the American Declaration of Independence, the work is also an important historical document. In its pages, Coleridge uses 19th-century philosophical ideas ... Read Biographia Literaria Summary

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a key figure in the British Romantic Era of poetry wrote the Gothic narrative poem “Christabel” in two parts, the first in 1797, and the second in 1800. Though it was still unfinished, “Christabel” was published in 1816.“Christabel” is Coleridge’s longest poem, at almost 700 lines. It is also the least edited of Coleridge’s work. Most of the poem contrasts the innocent piety of Christabel with the experience and supernatural abilities of ... Read Christabel Summary

Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802

... Read Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802 Summary

by Jane Austen

Emma is a fiction novel published in 1815 by the English author Jane Austen. The book centers on the character development of its eponymous protagonist, a genteel young woman on a country estate who meddles in the love lives of friends and neighbors. Jane Austen was conscious that Emma’s snobbery, vanity, and meddling might make her a “heroine whom no one but myself will much like.” (Austen-Leigh, James Edward. A Memoir of Jane Austen. London: ... Read Emma Summary

by John Keats

... Read Endymion Summary

Frankenstein

By mary shelley.

First published in 1818, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is a novel by Mary Shelley. It is written in the tradition of Romanticism, a late 18th-century and early 19th-century movement that responded to the Enlightenment. Rejecting rationalism, Romantic literature often celebrated the power of nature and of the individual. Frankenstein is also considered a Gothic novel because of its emphasis on darkness, the sensational, and the wildness of nature.Shelley was the daughter of political philosopher ... Read Frankenstein Summary

Frost at Midnight

... Read Frost at Midnight Summary

by Johanna Spyri

Swiss author Johanna Spyri originally published the middle-grade fiction novel Heidi in German in two volumes in 1880. The novel quickly became a beloved classic children’s book that has since been adapted into 25 film and television versions, including a 1968 made-for-TV movie and a very popular anime series in 1974. It has sold more than 50 million copies worldwide. Spyri was born in Hirzel, a Zurich village that shares a border with the German ... Read Heidi Summary

Highland Mary

... Read Highland Mary Summary

"Hope" Is the Thing with Feathers

... Read "Hope" Is the Thing with Feathers Summary

I Felt a Funeral, in My Brain

... Read I Felt a Funeral, in My Brain Summary

If you were coming in the fall

... Read If you were coming in the fall Summary

by Walter Scott

Ivanhoe is a historical fiction novel by Walter Scott, first published in 1819. The novel or “romance” is a fanciful account of English life in the 12th century, during the time of King Richard I (Richard “Coeur de Lion”). The protagonist of the story is Wilfred of Ivanhoe, a knight returning home from fighting in the Third Crusade. His journey weaves together historical events, religious conflict, and Medieval folklore and explores themes of Chivalry as ... Read Ivanhoe Summary

I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud

... Read I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud Summary

by Charlotte Brontë

Jane Eyre: An Autobiography is a bildungsroman, or coming of age novel, written by Charlotte Brontë and originally published in 1847 under the male pseudonym Currer Bell by Smith, Elder & Co. of London. Through Jane’s life and experiences, Brontë examines social issues including religious hypocrisy, class discrimination, and sexism. Many literary theorists and biographers—including Brontë’s friend and fellow novelist Elizabeth Gaskell—have also noted numerous similarities between the novel’s events and Brontë’s personal history. The ... Read Jane Eyre Summary

... Read London Summary

by Herman Melville

Published in 1851, Moby Dick was based in part on author Herman Melville’s own experiences on a whaleship. The novel tells the story of Ahab, the captain of a whaling vessel called The Pequod, who has a three-year mission to collect and sell the valuable oil of whales at the behest of the ship’s owners. Instead, the furious Ahab takes the ship on his own personal journey through hell, seeking revenge against the eponymous white ... Read Moby Dick Summary

... Read Mont Blanc Summary

... Read Mutability Summary

My Heart Leaps Up

... Read My Heart Leaps Up Summary

... Read Night Summary

Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood

... Read Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood Summary

Ode on Melancholy

... Read Ode on Melancholy Summary

Ode to the West Wind

Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” is an exemplary piece of Romantic Era poetry. It explores such themes as personal freedom, creation and the craft of poetry, and the role of the poet in 19th-Century British society, among other themes. The speaker makes use of apostrophe and personification to paint a picture of the West Wind’s awesome powers. Moving through the tight terza rima form with playful alliteration, grandiose imagery gradually gives way ... Read Ode to the West Wind Summary

On Seeing the Elgin Marbles

... Read On Seeing the Elgin Marbles Summary

Persuasion is the last novel completed by Jane Austen (1775-1817) before her death. Written between the years 1815-1816 and published posthumously, the Regency-era novel centers on the engagements and marriages of a small circle of middle-class families, with particular attention to the social and private lives of women. Echoing character dynamics found throughout Austen’s works, the romantic protagonists must confront the nature of their individual pride before fully realizing their relationship. This guide references the ... Read Persuasion Summary

Phenomenology of Spirit

By g. w. f. hegel.

... Read Phenomenology of Spirit Summary

Preface to Lyrical Ballads

“Preface to Lyrical Ballads” is an essay by the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth. In 1798 Wordsworth wrote, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the poetry collection Lyrical Ballads. Believing that the poems were so novel in theme and style that they required some explanation, Wordsworth wrote a prefatory essay to accompany the second edition of the poems in 1800; he then expanded the essay for the third edition of 1802. The “Preface” is often considered a ... Read Preface to Lyrical Ballads Summary

Pride and Prejudice

Published anonymously in 1813 by English author Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice is an example of a “novel of manners,” which presents a realistic picture of society through the customs and manners of everyday life. By depicting complex relationships between landowners and tradesmen, those with old money and the nouveaux riche, and men and women, Pride and Prejudice offers a glimpse into the social structures of early 19th-century England. The novel’s primary focus is marriage ... Read Pride and Prejudice Summary

by Lord George Gordon Byron (Lord Byron)

... Read Prometheus Summary

... Read Queen Mab Summary

Sense and Sensibility

Sense and Sensibility (1811) was the first published novel of British writer Jane Austen (1775-1817). Still a widely read author today, Austen published six complete novels and became famous for documenting the interior lives of young women in addition to the social mores of her time. She developed a distinctive form of narrative voice that oscillated between omniscient narration and free indirect discourse, which employs a third-person perspective but closely mirrors the consciousness of individual ... Read Sense and Sensibility Summary

She Dwelt Among The Untrodden Ways

... Read She Dwelt Among The Untrodden Ways Summary

She Walks in Beauty

... Read She Walks in Beauty Summary

Sunday Morning

By wallace stevens.

... Read Sunday Morning Summary

Tam O’Shanter

... Read Tam O’Shanter Summary

Thanatopsis

By william cullen bryant.

... Read Thanatopsis Summary

The Albatross

By charles baudelaire, transl. eli siegel.

... Read The Albatross Summary

The Bronze Horseman

By alexander pushkin.

The Bronze Horseman: A Saint Petersburg Story is a narrative poem by 19th-century Russian poet, dramatist, and novelist Alexander Pushkin, who is considered Russia’s greatest poet. It was written in 1833, but was not published until 1841, after Pushkin’s death due to censorship of Pushkin’s works by the Russian government.Regarded as one of Pushkin’s most accomplished works, The Bronze Horseman has had a marked influence on Russian literature. The poem tells of the founding of Saint ... Read The Bronze Horseman Summary

The Chimney Sweeper

William Blake’s poem “The Chimney Sweeper” was first published in his poetry collection Songs of Innocence (1789) and then republished in the expanded Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794). The latter collection includes another poem of the same title, which complements the first poem and clarifies Blake’s intention. All poems in the collection are short and deceivingly simple in form, borrowing from and building on the conventions of 18th-century poetry for children, designed to ... Read The Chimney Sweeper Summary

The Conqueror Worm

... Read The Conqueror Worm Summary

by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

... Read The Eagle Summary

The Eve of St. Agnes

... Read The Eve of St. Agnes Summary

The Fall of the House of Usher

American author Edgar Allan Poe wrote the Gothic short story “The Fall of the House of Usher” in 1839. It first appeared in Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine published in 1839 and in Poe’s collection of short stories Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque in 1840. Poe is considered one of the founders of Gothic and Romantic literature in the United States. He is best known for his poetry and short stories, which treat themes of mystery ... Read The Fall of the House of Usher Summary

... Read The Lake Summary

... Read The Lamb Summary

The Man Who Was Poe

The Man Who Was Poe is a young adult historical fiction novel published in 1989 by Edward Irving Wortis, an award-winning American author who writes under the pen name “Avi.” Set in Providence, Rhode Island in 1848, the story is about the unlikely partnership between Edgar Allan Poe and an 11-year-old London boy named Edmund. The book sources many facts from Poe’s life and works and emulates Poe’s own Gothic style of literature. Edmund turns ... Read The Man Who Was Poe Summary

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

... Read The Marriage of Heaven and Hell Summary

The Masque of Anarchy

... Read The Masque of Anarchy Summary

The Minister's Black Veil

By nathaniel hawthorne.

“The Minister’s Black Veil,” by American author Nathaniel Hawthorne, was first published anonymously in 1836. Hawthorne, author of the novel The Scarlet Letter, is known for exploring Puritanism in his works, which typically are set in New England. Hawthorne himself was born in Salem, Massachusetts, and was descended from John Hathorne, one of the judges in the Salem witch trials. Embarrassed by his ancestor’s role in the trials, Nathaniel Hawthorne added a “w” to his ... Read The Minister's Black Veil Summary

by Matthew Lewis

Written when he was just 19 (and, the author claimed, in only 10 weeks), Matthew Lewis’s The Monk: A Romance proved spectacularly popular with readers upon its first publication in 1796. At the same time, this Gothic tale of religious hypocrisy, sexual depravity, and supernatural visitations was roundly condemned as immoral; critics and readers alike were shocked by the novel’s explicit depictions of violence and sexuality. Lewis published four further editions of the novel in ... Read The Monk Summary

The Nightingale

... Read The Nightingale Summary

The Pit and the Pendulum

“The Pit and the Pendulum,” Edgar Allan Poe’s agonizing tale of terror and suspense, was first published in 1842. One of Poe’s many horror stories, “The Pit and the Pendulum” became famous for its depiction of pure dread. This guide refers to the 1992 Modern Library edition of Poe’s Collected Tales and Poems.The story begins with shocking suddenness: “I was sick—sick unto death with that long agony” (246). The narrator, we soon discover, is a ... Read The Pit and the Pendulum Summary

The Scarlet Letter

The Scarlet Letter is an 1850 novel by writer Nathaniel Hawthorne. The work, Hawthorne’s first full-length novel, is a classic of the American Romantic era. More specifically, its treatment of topics like sin, insanity, and the occult make it a work of Dark Romanticism—a movement related to the Gothic genre that includes works by Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville. The Scarlet Letter is also a piece of historical fiction; it is set in the ... Read The Scarlet Letter Summary

The Sick Rose

... Read The Sick Rose Summary

The Solitary Reaper

... Read The Solitary Reaper Summary

The Song of Hiawatha

By henry wadsworth longfellow.

... Read The Song of Hiawatha Summary

The Sorrows of Young Werther

By johann wolfgang von goethe.

The Sorrows of Young Werther is an epistolary, specifically a collection of letters, penned by prolific German author Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. It was published in the 1770s, and with its dark quixotic themes, it became a major influence to the later Romantic era. Loosely based on Goethe’s life, The Sorrows of Young Werther follows the melancholic experience and unfortunate events of Werther as he moves from place to place, experiencing the sorrows of life.In ... Read The Sorrows of Young Werther Summary

The Tell-Tale Heart

“The Tell-Tale Heart” is one of Edgar Allan Poe’s best-known short stories, first published in The Pioneer in January 1843. The work is written in the Gothic horror style from the second-person point of view. It has been adapted multiple times for various media, starting with a 1928 movie of the same name.Originally, the story included an epigraph with a stanza from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1838 poem “A Psalm of Life,” subtitled “What the Heart ... Read The Tell-Tale Heart Summary

The Triumph of Life

... Read The Triumph of Life Summary

... Read The Tyger Summary

The World Is Too Much with Us

... Read The World Is Too Much with Us Summary

This World is not Conclusion

... Read This World is not Conclusion Summary

... Read To Autumn Summary

... Read To Helen Summary

To My Mother

... Read To My Mother Summary

What mystery pervades a well!

... Read What mystery pervades a well! Summary

by Charles Brockden Brown

Weiland (1798), by Charles Brockden Brown, is one of the first Gothic horror novels printed in America and one of the earliest works in American literature to be influenced by European Romanticism. The narrative appears to have been based on newspaper accounts of the James Yates murders, in which a New York native murdered his wife and four children, claiming that the Holy Spirit told him to do so. Brown often fused history and fiction ... Read Wieland Summary

Wuthering Heights

By emily brontë.

Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights was published in December 1847 under the pen name Ellis Bell. This literary classic is Emily Brontë’s only novel, and the book is currently widely appreciated as an exemplary sample of British Romantic literature. At the time of publication, most critical reviews of Wuthering Heights were disapproving at best and scathing at worst, so much so that her sister Charlotte Brontë, who wrote Jane Eyre under the pen name Currer Bell ... Read Wuthering Heights Summary

A Short Analysis of T. E. Hulme’s ‘Romanticism and Classicism’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Romanticism and Classicism’ by T. E. Hulme (1883-1917) was posthumously published as part of the 1924 collection Speculations but probably written in 1911-12. It’s an important attack on romanticism in art and poetry, and was an influential defence of the ‘philosophy’ (though that may be too grand a word for it) underpinning much modernist poetry in English.

You can read ‘Romanticism and Classicism’ here ; in this post we’re going to attempt to summarise and analyse the main points of Hulme’s argument.

T. E. Hulme had begun ‘A Lecture on Modern Poetry’ (1908) by saying, ‘A reviewer writing in the Saturday Review last week spoke of poetry as the means by which the soul soared into higher regions, and as a means of expression by which it became merged into a higher kind of reality. Well, that is the kind of statement that I utterly detest. I want to speak of verse in a plain way as I would of pigs: that is the only honest way.’

Pigs, as the old cliché has it, cannot fly; they roll around in the mud, are bound up with the earth, are down-to-earth creatures. It is for these reasons that Hulme chooses them for the purposes of analogy. We have a firm sense of coming back down to earth with a bump. Good modern poetry is rooted to the ground, and may only treat of higher things within strict limits.

In ‘Romanticism and Classicism’, Hulme states that there are two basic positions to adopt in relation to humanity: the romantic and the classical. The romantic position is ‘that man, the individual, is an infinite reservoir of possibilities; and if you can so rearrange society by the destruction of oppressive order then these possibilities will have a chance and you will get Progress.’

The classical position, by contrast, sees man as ‘an extraordinarily fixed and limited animal whose nature is absolutely constant. It is only by tradition and organisation that anything decent can be got out of him.’

Hulme uses the metaphor of the well and the bucket to illustrate these two concepts: romanticism is like a well, because there is a limitless faith in human potential and achievement; by contrast, classicism is the bucket. You can only fill up a bucket with a limited amount of water, whereas a well could, in theory, go on filling your bucket time and time again.

Romanticism is about limitless possibility; classicism is about limitation and restraint. Hulme is firmly on the side of classicism, arguing that the romantic impulse has dominated poetry for too long, and it’s time for a return to classical values.

How does this classical view manifest itself in poetry? Hulme elaborates:

What I mean by classical in verse, then, is this. That even in the most imaginative flights there is always a holding back, a reservation. The classical poet never forgets this finiteness, this limit of man. He remembers always that he is mixed up with earth. He may jump, but he always returns back; he never flies away into the circumambient gas.

Hulme’s poetry is frequently a lucid embodiment of this classical spirit: larks are not ‘ascending’ (as in the title of the George Meredith poem and Vaughan Williams composition) but are likened to fleas crawling on a human body; the moon is not some grand symbol of beauty but is like the red face of a farmer. Things are constantly being reined in, brought down to earth. But if this is the case, then where is the grandeur in such poetry? Where, for want of a better word, is its ‘poetic’ quality?

Hulme argues that the problem with romanticism is that poets on the ‘romantic’ side (and here he doesn’t refer narrowly to Romanticism with a capital R – he means not only Wordsworth, Shelley, Coleridge, and some of Keats, but also a later poet like Swinburne) always want to bring in talk of ‘the infinite’: they want to reflect this ‘infinite reservoir of possibilities’ by implying that, in terms of humanity’s achievements and potential, the sky’s the limit. Hulme has little time for such a view.

But if you banish talk of the infinite from verse, what do you bring in, what stands in place of the infinite and provides the poem with its ‘poetic’ aspect? Hulme’s answer is ‘zest’, which he sees as the poet’s contemplation of the world, with the poem being an ‘accurate description’ of the things the poet observes.

In other words, this zest ‘heightens a thing out of the level of prose’ without raising it to such a high level that you end up talking about the infinite, and exaggerating the beauty or grandeur of the thing being described. Hulme uses an example from Robert Herrick’s seventeenth-century poem ‘Delight in Disorder’, which describes a woman’s creased petticoat as ‘tempestuous’.

Tempests are on a grand scale, but what saves this metaphor from flying off into the realm of the infinite is the use of the adjective ‘tempestuous’ to refer to something as small and everyday as a piece of clothing. We can observe a similar comparison in Hulme’s poem ‘The Embankment’ , which likens the vastness of the starry night sky to a moth-eaten blanket.

What links this ‘zest’ in ‘Romanticism and Classicism’ to Hulme’s previous ‘Lecture on Modern Poetry’ is his call for clear, direct metaphors in this new ‘classical’ poetry:

It always endeavours to arrest you, and to make you continuously see a physical thing, to prevent you gliding through an abstract process. It chooses fresh epithets and fresh metaphors, not so much because they are new, and we are tired of the old, but because the old cease to convey a physical thing and become abstract counters. A poet says a ship ‘coursed the seas’ to get a physical image, instead of the counter world ‘sailed’. Visual meanings can only be transferred by the new bowl of metaphor; prose is an old pot that lets them leak out.

We might analyse and summarise this position as follows: poetry should be about hard, clear language and vivid, sharp, physical images. In short, we need a new ‘dry, hard, classical verse’ that reacts against the ‘wet’ romanticism of much recent poetry.

Hulme’s role in modernism, then, was as a shaker-upper, a rabble-rouser, a populariser of ideas. If you wish to see modernism as a literary revolution (and many have), Hulme would be one of its more anarchic and disruptive revolutionaries. But for all his bluster and provocative posturing, Hulme had a serious desire to make poetry new and to reinvent the very language and style in which English poetry was written.

‘Romanticism and Classicism’ sets out and analyses the problems with romanticism and suggests how a classical spirit might be introduced into modern poetry in place of the romantic. The changes he introduced are still with us to this day.

Continue to explore Hulme’s work with his war poem composed in the trenches , his lecture on modern poetry , and our pick of Hulme’s best poems . For a more detailed discussion of Hulme, we recommend this book by the founder-editor of Interesting Literature , Dr Oliver Tearle,  T.E. Hulme and Modernism .

Discover more from Interesting Literature

Subscribe to get the latest posts to your email.

Type your email…

5 thoughts on “A Short Analysis of T. E. Hulme’s ‘Romanticism and Classicism’”

ThNks for sharing. Will have to look more into this artist. Weve got s rough draft out for a new short story of ours called Eaten an Eskimo and your thoughts on it would be incredible

I don’t know if I agree with him entirely about Romanticism, but I do find empty, grandiose poetics off-putting. Poetry should earn its grandeur, and even undersell it if necessary.

I agree, Bryan – Hulme had a talent for rhetorical overstatement, and as I’ve argued in a short book on Hulme, I think his poetry manages that undersell very effectively (though I think he’s also more Romantic than he lets on)…

Thank you. Very well explained. Esoecially the first part :)

Thank you! :)

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading

If You Read One Romance This Spring, Make It This One

Our romance columnist recommends three terrific new books, but the one she loves most is Cat Sebastian’s “You Should Be So Lucky.”

Credit... Michela Buttignol

Supported by

• Share full article

By Olivia Waite

Olivia Waite is the Book Review’s romance fiction columnist. She writes queer historical romance, fantasy and critical essays on the genre’s history and future.

• April 24, 2024

Spring! There’s no better time of year for a baseball romance. We’ll wind up the column with a much-anticipated book by Cat Sebastian, but we lead off with KT Hoffman’s endearing and tender new novel, THE PROSPECTS (Dial, 346 pp., paperback, $18) .

The minor-league baseball player Gene Ionescu is almost living his best life. He’s a professional ballplayer, even if it’s for a minor-league team. He’s transitioned and is generally accepted as the guy he is, even if a trans man still doesn’t have quite the same locker room experience as a cis man. In this liminal space, he makes a finicky distinction between hope — which he exercises as dutifully as a muscle — and actual wanting, which would inevitably lead to disappointment because hasn’t it always?

Enter Luis Estrada, Gene’s former college teammate.

Luis, the son of a major-league star, was drafted before graduation. Now he steals Gene’s place at shortstop and upsets his balance — at least, until they’re forced to room together on a road trip and discover that making out turns their physical chemistry from something destructive into something electric. But dating a teammate is a terrible idea — especially when you’re certain the teammate is going to be called up and will leave you behind.

Except that isn’t quite how it goes. We’re right there with Gene as he struggles with going from almost enough to more than plenty, as he stops letting life happen to him and learns to actually reach for something. Because what if true happiness is right there, and it’s even sweeter than you dreamed?

The difference between wishing for good things and working toward them is precisely where Lily Chu’s THE TAKEDOWN (Sourcebooks Casablanca, 384 pp., $16.99) finds its footing. The diversity consultant Dee Kwan clings to positive thinking through layoffs, microaggressions and familial health challenges. All the while, her mother insists that a positive attitude is more important than any minor speed bump like your parents and grandmother moving in with you or a house that now smells constantly of medicinal weed. Her one true comfort is the online puzzle game where she’s usually first in the rankings.

Then Dee lands a new job, only to find her nearest gaming rival, Teddy, there. Even worse, he’s the son of the C.E.O. whose toxic corporate culture she’s being paid to improve.

Dee fixes upon improving Teddy’s dad’s company as a stand-in for fixing the world (and her own life). Teddy, on the other hand, has detached himself emotionally from his job, bruised by past disappointments. Chu’s couple find their solution in making small but significant changes to what’s immediate and reachable — relationships both romantic and otherwise. What they learn is that effort and hope have to work together: One without the other is never enough.

But sometimes there is no hope. Illness worsens, accidents strike, you lose people you love. It’s inevitable, as Cat Sebastian’s blunt, beautiful midcentury historical makes clear: “Unless a couple has the good fortune to get hit by the same freight train, their story ends in exactly one way.”

At the start of YOU SHOULD BE SO LUCKY (Avon, 382 pp., paperback, $18.99) , the journalist Mark Bailey is only 16 months out from the death of his partner. He’s coasting. It’s only when he’s assigned to write about a flailing baseball player on the sad-sack New York Robins that he finds something to connect to: “What’s happening to Eddie O’Leary is an end . That’s something Mark knows about; that’s something Mark can write about.”

Eddie, “a wad of bad ideas rolled into the approximate shape and size of a professional baseball player,” doesn’t know why he is suddenly terrible at a game he loves. He’s lonely and new to the city and shunned by the teammates he bad-mouthed to the press. He’s grateful for Mark’s attention even though he knows it’s an assignment, and he’s quick to notice all the little kind impulses Mark would die rather than admit to. Their romance is like watching a Labrador puppy fall in love with a pampered Persian cat, all eager impulse on one side and arch contrariness on the other.

People think the ending is what defines a romance, and it does, but that’s not what a romance is for. The end is where you stop, but the journey is why you go. Whether we’re talking about love, baseball or life itself, Sebastian’s book bluntly scorns measuring success merely by end results: “The crowd is hopeful, but it isn’t the kind of hope that comes with a fighting chance. It’s a hope that doesn’t need success to validate it. It’s something like affection, maybe with a bit of loyalty mixed in.”

Hoping, loving are things you do for their own sake, to mark being a human among other humans. Or as Eddie puts it: “Sometimes you want to look at a guy and say: Well, he’s f——-, but he’s trying.”

I can think of no better summary of why we do any art. If you read one romance this spring, make it this one.

Explore More in Books

Want to know about the best books to read and the latest news start here..

How did fan culture take over? And why is it so scary? Justin Taylor’s novel “Reboot” examines the convergence of entertainment , online arcana and conspiracy theory.

Jamaica Kincaid and Kara Walker unearth botany’s buried history  to figure out how our gardens grow.

A new photo book reorients dusty notions of a classic American pastime with  a stunning visual celebration of black rodeo.

Two hundred years after his death, this Romantic poet is still worth reading . Here’s what made Lord Byron so great.

Harvard’s recent decision to remove the binding of a notorious volume  in its library has thrown fresh light on a shadowy corner of the rare book world.

Bus stations. Traffic stops. Beaches. There’s no telling where you’ll find the next story based in Accra, Ghana’s capital . Peace Adzo Medie shares some of her favorites.

Each week, top authors and critics join the Book Review’s podcast to talk about the latest news in the literary world. Listen here .

Advertisement