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Romanticism

Romanticism
Romanticism is a movement that reflected deep interest in both nature and in thoughts and feelings of the individual. Romantic thinkers and writers turned from reason to emotion, and from society to nature. It is a movement that structured the ways in which people in Western cultures thought about themselves and about their world. It was combined most strongly in the visual arts, music, and literature. Romanticism affected not just literature but music, paintings and our perception of the world. (Honour 1-2)
Emotion was a key element of Romanticism. However, Romanticism went beyond feelings. Romantics expressed a wide range of ideas and attitudes, such as the supernatural, emotions, imagination, the exotic, heroic actions, music and much more. It valued the common people and the individual. As well as, promoted radical change and democracy. Poetry, music, and painting were the most influential arts because they were able to capture the emotion of romanticism.
Romanticism in English literature began in the 1790’s with the publications of The Lyrical Ballads of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. They both honored nature as the source of truth and beauty. The Lyrical Ballads became the objective of the English Romantic movement in poetry. The painters J.M.W. Turner and John Constable are also generally associated with Romanticism.
The second phase of Romanticism was from about 1805 to the 1830’s. Cultural nationalism, poetry, music, and a new attention to national origins marked the beginning of it. Sir Walter Scott translated the historical appreciation into imaginative writing. Later English Romantic poets, such as John Keats, Lord Byron, and Percy Bysshe Shelly wrote poems celebrating rebellious heroes, passionate love, and the mystery and beauty of nature. Works dealing with the supernatural came from Romanticism, such as, Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein and works by C.R Maturing, the Marquis de Sade, and E.T.A Hoffmann.
Gothic...