Romanticism
Romanticism is an artistic movement that emerged in the late eighteenth century, emphasizing individualism, imagination, and deep emotional expression. It arose as a response to the rationalism of the Enlightenment and the structured approaches of neoclassicism, which prioritized order and logic. Originating in Germany with the Sturm und Drang movement, Romanticism quickly spread across Europe and the Americas, permeating literature, visual arts, and music. Key literary figures include William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Lord Byron, whose works often featured complex characters engaged in profound emotional experiences. In visual arts, prominent artists like J. M. W. Turner and Eugène Delacroix captured the sublime beauty of nature and human emotion through dynamic contrasts and innovative themes. The Romantic era also significantly influenced music, with composers such as Frédéric Chopin and Franz Liszt exploring rich melodies and folk traditions. While the movement's prominence waned by the mid-nineteenth century, its legacy continues to shape various artistic expressions, including symbolism and modernism, highlighting its lasting impact on culture.
Romanticism
Romanticism refers to an artistic movement that began in the late eighteenth century and represented a revolutionary rethinking of the arts and the role of the artist by emphasizing the individual, the imagination, and the exploration of a range of intense emotions. Although the aesthetic theorizing that first shifted the arts from a rational and objective exploration of humanity toward a focus on individual subjectivity began in Germany with the Sturm und Drang movement of the 1770s and 1780s, within decades the liberal theories of romanticism had found expression in virtually every European culture and in the Americas.
Born from the rejection of the conservative traditions of the Enlightenment—specifically the pressure of the sciences that emphasized logic, reason, and objectivity and that reduced the natural world to a puzzle that required solution—romanticism emphasized feelings and subjectivity in aesthetic and literary expression. Furthermore, romanticism represented a backlash to the changes brought on by the Industrial Revolution and celebrated the mystery and sublimity of the natural world.
Background
Romanticism is often said to have its roots in a rejection of the neoclassicism movement of the mid-eighteenth century. The rigorous thought and strict reasoning of neoclassicism had emphasized order, balance, and restraint and established a methodology for analyzing human activity sensibly and coolly. Neoclassicist thought had been born out of revived interest in ancient Greek and Roman culture and rested heavily on the assumption that human nature is unchanging, leading to an emphasis on general truths about humanity.
Furthermore, the ethos of the Enlightenment of the late seventeenth century and mid-eighteenth century rested on the scientific method and emphasized objective and intellectual thought. What had been displaced, and indeed distrusted, were the subjective, the individual, the irrational, and the spontaneous.
The romantic movement proposed that the individual, although irrational and emotional, was an imperfect but heroic figure. The romantic movement took root in Germany but quickly spread across Europe. In its early expressions in English literature, such as in the poetry of William Blake (1757–1827) and the 1798 collection Literary Ballads by William Wordsworth(1770–1850) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), romanticism was characterized by simple yet highly evocative language and a focus on individuals of the lower and middle classes. Other prominent romantic literary works include the dramas of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), the transcendent love poetry of Lord Byron (1788–1824), the poetry of art and its timelessness of John Keats (1795–1821), the historical novels of Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832), and the transcendent odes of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822).
Romantic poetry and prose works were often rich and densely layered and featured complex and idiosyncratic protagonists. The romantic hero was often an isolated figure, deeply sensitive, easily wounded, and prone to flights of fantasy. Unlike the neoclassical tradition that held the writer as a kind of public figure and devalued personal experiences, romantic writers unabashedly explored their own individual psyches and emotional lives as fit subjects for exploration. Romantic writers did not hesitate to take imaginative ventures into exotic locales and often drew on ancient or folk cultures for inspiration. As the romantic movement developed (and as it found a wide public reception) the explorations grew even bolder, moving into experiences of the paranormal, as a generation of writers celebrated the rich, transcendent power of the imagination. For example, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) combined elements of the gothic and romantic movements.
The intensity of the emotions celebrated in romantic literature also found expression in the visual arts; canvasses captured the grandeur of otherwise simple local landscapes or sought out mysterious and haunted faces for portraiture. Romantic art was characterized by sharp contrasts of light and shadow, a rise in landscape art, and an exploration of a wider variety of subject matter than in neoclassical art, which often focused on historical or mythological themes. Prominent romantic artists included J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851), John Constable (1776–1837), and Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863).
Romanticism also had a profound influence on music, especially in Germany. Music of the romantic era was characterized by increasing experimentation in musical forms, particularly a revived interest in folk musical traditions, and by bold, rich, evocative melodies—sometimes stormy, sometimes lyrical—that elicited profound emotions from audiences. The era saw the rise of such romantic composers as Frédéric Chopin (1810–49), Felix Mendelssohn (1809–47), Franz Schubert (1797–1828), Robert Schumann (1810–56), and Franz Liszt (1811–86). Romantic music also saw an increasing interest in nationalist themes, dispensing with the neoclassical ideal of the universal.
Romanticism Today
Although the romantics—whether in the visual arts, literature, or music—are still among the most beloved artists, embraced even today, the era itself was relatively short lived. By the mid-nineteenth century, with the invention of the camera and the rise of realism, the arts abandoned the romantic fascination with the individual, the emotions, the imagination, the exotic, and the supernatural and turned toward the immediate. However, romanticism still had a profound influence on subsequent artistic movements, particularly symbolism, surrealism, and modernism.
Bibliography
Berlin, Isaiah, Henry Hardy, John Gray. The Roots of Romanticism. 2nd ed. Princeton UP, 2013.
Blanning, Tim. The Romantic Revolution: A History. Modern Library, 2011.
Brown, David Blayney. Romanticism. 2001. Phaidon, 2010.
Ferber, Michael. Romanticism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford UP, 2010.
Goodman, Russell B. American Philosophy and the Romantic Tradition. Cambridge UP, 2008.
Newman, Lance, Joel Pace, and Chris Koenig-Woodyard, eds. Transatlantic Romanticism: An Anthology of British, American, and Canadian Literature, 1767–1867. Longman, 2006.
Wu, Duncan, ed. Romanticism: An Anthology. 5th ed. Wiley-Blackwell, 2024.