Classicism and Romanticism
Toward the end of the eighteenth-century, Romanticism emerged as a response to Classicism. Even though this change was gradual, it transformed everything from art and philosophy to education and science. While the Classicists thought of the world as having a rigid and stern structure, the romanticists thought of the world as a place to express their ideas and believes. The Romanticists and Classicists differed in their views of the relationship between an individual and society, their views of nature and the relationship between reason and imagination.
Classicists and Romanticists differed in their views of nature. Classicism was based on the idea that nature and human nature could be understood by reason and thought. Classicist believed that “nature was, a self-contained machine, like a watch, whose laws of operation could be rationally understood.” On the other hand, Romanticists viewed nature as mysterious and ever changing. As William Cullen Bryant states that nature “; speaks a various language.” Romantic writes believed that nature is an ever changing living organism, whose laws we will never fully understand.
Classicist and Romanticists also differed on their approaches towards reason and imagination. Classicism attached much more importance to reason than imagination because imagination could not be explained by their laws. To them, “;the imagination, though essential to literature, had to be restrained by reason and common sense.” The Romanticists, however, emphasized that reason was not the only path to truth. “Instead, Romantic writers emphasized intuition, that inner perception of truth which is independent of reason.” To the Romantic writers, imagination was ultimately superior to reason.
The Term Paper on Faith Reason Imagination
Faith, in the religious sense, is the belief based upon our spiritual connections with God. Faith aids, stabilizes and nourishes us spiritually allowing our knowledge of his words to grow. Since there are so many different religious faiths, one must indulge in the one that is closer to home. Christianity is the religion that is dominant in the United States. It is faith and belief that Jesus ...
Yet another area of difference between Classicists and Romanticists whether they placed greater importance on tradition or whether they chose to innovate. Classicists thought that it was literature’s function to show the everyday values of humanity and the laws of human existence. Their idea was that “classicism upheld tradition, often to the point of resisting change, because tradition seemed a reliable testing ground for those laws.” As for the Romantics, they wrote about how man has no boundaries and endless possibilities. “Who,” Emerson asked, “can set bounds to the possibilities of man?” Opposing classicists’ importance being put on human limitation, “the Romantics stressed the human potential for social progress and spiritual growth.”
Because the expression Romanticism is a phenomenon of immense scope, embracing as it does, literature, politics, history, philosophy and the arts in general, there has never been much agreement and much confusion as to what the word means. It has, in fact, been used in so many different ways that some scholars have argued that the best thing we could do with the expression is to abandon it once and for all. However, the phenomenon of Romanticism would not become less complex by simply throwing away its label of convenience.
Originally, Romanticism referred to the characteristics of romances, whose extravagance carried somewhat pejorative connotations. But in the 18th century the term came to designate a new kind of exotic landscape which evoked feelings of pleasant melancholy. The term Romantic as a designation for a school of literature opposed to the Classic was first used by the German critic Karl Wilhelm Friedrich von Schlegel (1772-1829) at the beginning of the 19th century. From Germany, this meaning was carried to England and France.
Since no single figure or literary school displays all the characteristics considered to be “Romantic,” any general definitions tend to be imprecise. In addition, these characteristics are often discerned in artists and cultural movements not usually so designated. They are not, in fact, the exclusive property of the Romantic period, but it is here that they are dominant and give identity to an era.
The Essay on Romantic Age Romantics Emotions Reason
The nineteenth century brought with it many new views and a large variety of themes. One of theses main ideas was known as Romanticism. The main point of the Romanticism was to focus on feelings not answers. It had an impact on many places. This was a believe of poetry, music, arts, and writing. This was a time for your emotions not your mind. It was a large step back from a modern society. he ...
One of the fundamentals of Romanticism is the belief in the natural goodness of man, the idea that man in a state of nature would behave well but is hindered by civilization (Rousseau — “man is born free and everywhere he is in chains”).
The “savage” is noble, childhood is good and the emotions inspired by both beliefs causes the heart to soar. On the contrary, urban life and the commitment to “getting and spending,” generates a fear and distrust of the world. If man is inherently sinful, reason must restrain his passions, but if he is naturally good, then in an appropriate environment, his emotions can be trusted (Blake — “bathe in the waters of life”).
The idea of man’s natural goodness and the stress on emotion also contributed to the development of Romantic individualism, that is, the belief that what is special in a man is to be valued over what is representative (the latter oftentimes connected with the conventions imposed on man by “civilized society.” If a man may properly express his unique emotional self because its essence is good, he is also likely to assume also that its conflicts and corruptions are a matter of great import and a source of fascination to himself and others. So, the Romantic delights in self-analysis. Both William Wordsworth (in The Prelude) and Lord Byron (in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage), poets very different from one another, felt the need to write lengthy poems of self-dramatization. The self that Byron dramatized, a projection not identical with his own personality, was especially dear to the Romantic mind: the outcast wanderer, heroic by accursed, often on some desperate quest, in the tradition of Cain or the Flying Dutchman. S. T. Coleridge’s Mariner and Herman Melville’s Ahab are similar Romantic pilgrims.
For English literature the most significant expression of a Romantic commitment to emotion occurs in Wordsworth’s preface to the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads (1800), where he maintains that “all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” Although Wordsworth qualifies this assertion by suggesting that the poet is a reflective man who recollects his emotion “in tranquility,” the emphasis on spontaneity, on feeling, and the use of the term overflow mark sharp diversions from the earlier ideals of judgment and restraint.
The Essay on Views Of Mans Nature
Mans nature can be looked at in many different ways. Observing a few of the several views helps one to appreciate all of the positive and negative characteristics man has brought forth. The majority of the views are negative, or pessimistic, and they are attracted to the thought of whether man has any hope, whereas the positive views focus on the outstanding needs and abilities of man. Christmas ...
Searching for a fresh source of this spontaneous feeling, Wordsworth rejects the Neoclassic idea of the appropriate subject for serious verse and turns to the simplicities of rustic life “because in that condition the passions of men are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature.” That interaction with nature has for many of the Romantic poets mystical overtones. Nature is apprehended by them not only as an exemplar and source of vivid physical beauty but as a manifestation of spirit in the universe as well. In Tintern Abbey Wordsworth suggests that nature has gratified his physical being, excited his emotions, and ultimately allowed him “a sense sublime/Of something far more deeply interfused,” of a spiritual force immanent not only in the forms of nature but “in the mind of man.”
Though not necessarily in the same terms, a similar connection between the world of nature and the world of the spirit is also made by Blake, Coleridge, Byron and Shelley.
In his desire to identify with a spiritual force, the Romantics often expressed the Faustian aspiration after the sublime and the wonderful. Committed to change, flux rather than stasis, he longs to believe that man is perfectible, that moral as well as mechanical progress is possible. Although the burst of hope and enthusiasm that marked the early stages of the French Revolution was soon muted, its echoes lingered through much of the 19th century and even survive in the 20th century. If the Romantic often sees his enemy in the successful bourgeois, the Philistine with a vested interest in social stability, political revolution is not always his goal. His admiration for the natural, the organic, which in art leads to the overthrow of the Classical rules and the development of a unique form for each work, in politics may lead him to subordinate the individual to the state and insist that the needs of the whole govern the activities of the parts.
Although these characteristics of Romanticism suggest something of its nature, they are far from exhaustive. The phenomenon is too diverse and too contradictory to admit of an easy definition. As Lovejoy suggested, “typical manifestations of the spiritual essence of Romanticism have been variously conceived to be a passion for moonlight, for red waistcoats, for Gothic churches . . . for talking exclusively about oneself, for hero-worship, for losing oneself in an ecstatic contemplation of nature.”
The Term Paper on Romantic Poet Coleridge Man Poetry
... through the forms of the material world to a greater, spiritual reality behind it" (58). In this way, the Romantics turned towards ... and moral commentary" (44). The ambiguous nature of Romantic poetry with its allusions to nature and certain images such as "the ... particularly in the organic relationship which it posits between man and nature, or the universe, and (less often) between the individual ...
