Romanticism as a literary genre appeared in English literature with the publication of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads in the 1790s, which was followed by the works of poets such as William Blake, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelly, Lord Byron and many others. Subsequently, Romanticism spread to German and French speaking areas, with writers such as E.T.A. Hoffmann and Victor Hugo. It owes its roots to the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution, out of which it emerged as an ideological, artistic movement nostalgic for old hierarchies of the pre-industrial era, while its authors were characterized by creative imagination, inspired vision and spontaneity, as opposed to the most common traits of the Enlightenment era, which put focus on reason, sense, moderation, the urban areas and didactic conformity.
The Romantic poetry fought with emotion and passion against cold reason and logic; when instructed to use their sense, they resorted to intuition and inner visions; they struggled against the orderly creative process with spontaneity of feeling, finding inspiration in the pastoral visions of the countryside, as opposed to urban imagery; they utterly neglected the didactic literary qualities of the Enlightenment, which are contrasted by the Romantics’ expressive poetic verse, focused on the poet himself, his rejection, revolt and stylistic autonomy.
The Enlightenment ideology, for all the occasional dullness of its emphasis on uniformity and abstraction, was always determinedly internationalist, while the Romantic ideology, for all its enthusiasm for infinite variety and transcendence, was at its core concrete, experiential and nationalist (Thorslev 96). Consequently, it was exactly this nationalism which culminated in the Revolution and the Napoleonic era. This was the time of the flowering of the radical thought of Romanticism, the vision of which “fuses history, politics, philosophy and religion into one grand design” (cited in Day 96). The French Revolution, taking place in 1789, was a symbol of the bourgeois rebellion in an effort to take the power of authority from out the hands of nobility, which was responsible for the disillusionment of the people and obsolete laws. This revolution demanding liberty, brotherhood and equal rights for all destructed the old structures of social and political power in France and beyond its borders. The Romantics agreed with the massive change brought upon the world by the French Revolution and were of the belief that “neither an individual nor a nation will be capable of living in freedom or as a republic of equals until they overcome the conflicts within them” (Ferber 20). They witnessed this grand revolution and its violence and bloodshed, but not once did they think it unnecessary. On the contrary, they upheld the firm belief that out of this chaos of human history good will eventually surface, because the Divine Providence works in mysterious ways. Still, this enormous bloodshed did have a profound effect on the already overly melancholy nature of the Romantic poets, resulting in their somewhat depressed lyrics which appear to abandon all hope and allow disillusion and despair to take over. However, this despairing notion was usually converted into a source of solace for the poet, because even though the individual human spirit may be broken, humankind’s infinite hopes and dreams, its creative and imaginative faculty can make a grand change on a collective scale.
In addition, the Romantic poets were witnesses of another very prominent shape-shifting socio-historical event, namely the Industrial Revolution, during the period of both democracy and industry development. It emerged in Britain, around 1750s and nurtured astronomical changes in technology, agriculture, transport, mining and numerous other industrial fields, thus being deemed one of the major turning points in the history of mankind. However, this was a time of ideological oppression, because anything that was deemed as threatening to this technologic expansion and its proprietors was instantly eradicated. This technological expansion happened at the cost of human individuality and freedom, something the Romantics value most highly and could not do without. In consequence, they endeavored to set the humankind free from these oppressive chains of technology and industry, deeply yearning for the man’s return to a simpler, more natural existence, in pastoral surroundings of harmony with nature and the self, instead of the urban one they were subject to.
This new Romantic creative writer who emerged from the depths of the Enlightenment era has expanded his understandings of the working of his social surroundings and is nostalgic for the simpler times; times of pre-industrial principles, old hierarchies and the lost individualism and subjectivity. Thus, the Romantic philosophy has been inevitably shaped by the socio-historical construct in which it was conceived, such as the tumultuous events of the French Revolution and the individual-devouring Industrial Revolution. Still, they remain faithful to the traditions of literary history, in an effort to preserve the old by inscribing it in the new, struggling against and at the same time, incorporating the cultural, social and historical element in their poetic works, created to measure the man’s great potential in the most dire of times.
Works Cited:
Curran, Stuart. ed. The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Print.
Day, Aidan. Romanticism. New York: Routledge, 1996. Print.
Ferber, Michael. Romanticism: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Print.
Roe, Nicholas. Romanticism: an Oxford guide. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Print.
Thorslev, Peter. “German Romantic Idealism.” The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism. Ed. Stuart Curran. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Print.
