FREE ESSAY ON THE DEVELOPMENT AND IMPACT OF ROMANRICISM ON THE EUPROPEAN WORLD

THE DEVELOPMENT AND IMPACT OF ROMANRICISM ON THE EUPROPEAN WORLD

Romanticism, in a way, was a reaction against rigid Classicism, Rationalism, and Deism of
the eighteenth century. Strongest in application between 1800 and 1850, the Romantic
Movement differed from country to country and from romanticist to romanticist. Because it
emphasized change it was an atmosphere in which events occurred and came to affect not
only the way humans thought and expressed themselves, but also the way they lived
socially and politically. (Abrams, M.H. Pg. 13)
"Romanticism emphasized the individual, the subjective, the irrational, the imaginative,
the personal, the spontaneous, the emotional, the visionary, and the
transcendental,"(www.go.grolier.com/romanticism)
Among the characteristic attitudes of Romanticism were the following: a deepened
appreciation of the beauties of nature; a general exaltation of emotion over reason and
of the senses over intellect; a turning in upon the self and heightened examination of
human personality and its moods and mental potentialities; a preoccupation with genius,
the hero, and the exceptional figure in general, and a focus on his passions and inner
struggles; a new view of the artist as a supremely individual creator, whose creative
spirit is more important that strict adherence to formal rules and traditional
procedures; an obsessive interest in folk culture, national and ethnic cultural origins,
and the medieval era; and a fondness for the exotic, the remote, the mysterious, the
weird, the monstrous, the diseased, and even the satanic.(Barzun, Jaques. Pg 157-159)
Romanticism was preceded by several related developments from the mid-18th century that
can be called Pre-Romanticism. Among such trends was a new appreciation of the medieval
romance, from which the Romantic Movement derives its name. (Abrams,M.H. Pg. 261) 
The romance was a tale or ballad of chivalric adventure whose emphasis on individual
heroism and on the exotic and mysterious was in clear contrast to the elegant formality
and artificiality of widespread Classical forms of literature, such as French
Neoclassical tragedy. This new interest in relatively unsophisticated but emotional
literary expressions of the past was to be a dominant note in Romanticism. (Frenz, Horst
and Stallknecht, Newton P. pgs 70-73)
Romanticism in English literature began in the 1790's was the publication of Lyrical
Ballads written by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Cloeridge. Wordsworth's "Preface"
to the second edition (1800) of Lyrical Ballads, in which he describes poetry as " the
spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings," became the manifesto of the English Romantic
Movement in poetry. (Thompson, E.P. Pgs 33-34)
The first phase of Romantic Movement was in Germany, which was marked by the innovations
in both content and literary style and by a preoccupation with the mystical, the
subconscious, and the supernatural. (Abrams, M.H. Pg.68)
The most momentous national movement was Germany's. The Germans rebelled not only against
Napoleonic rule but against the century old upper hand of French civilization. They
rebelled not only against the French armies but against the philosophy of the Age of
Enlightenment. "The years of the French Revolution and Napoleon were, for Germany, the
year of it greatest Cultural Efflorescence." (Abrams, M.H. Pg. 73) 
Germany became the most "romantic" of all countries, and German influence spread
throughout Europe. In the nineteenth century, the Germans came to be widely regarded as
intellectual leaders, like the French had been a century before. Most of the German
thought had come from nationalism in a broad sense.
A wealth of talents, including Friedrich Holderlin, the early Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,
Jean Paul, Novalis, Ludwig Tieck, A.W. and Friedrich Schlegel, Wilhelm Heinrich
Wackenroder, and Friedrich Schelling belong to this first phase. In Revolutionary France,
the Vicomte de Chateabriande and Mme de Stael were the chief initiators of Romanticism,
by virtue of their influential historical and theoretical writings. (Abrams, M.H. Pg.
81)
While Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads are generally taken to mark the formal
beginning of English romanticism, important elements of the movement were formed
throughout the 18th century. 
The British landscape and deep past were explored and reinvented in 
diverse ways by James Thomson, Thomas Gray, James Macpherson, and Thomas Chatterton,
helping to establish the tastes for balladry and nature on which Wordsworth and Coleridge
drew. (Thompson, E.P. Pgs 111-113)
William Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge constitute the early romantics. They join
together primarily because their art and thought developed in direct response to the
French Revolution. Early adherents to the Revolution's precepts, all three writers were
repulsed by its violent extremes under the Terror and its reversion to strongman rule
under Napoleon. Their social philosophies developed distinctly religious casts,
emphasizing spiritual development rather than direct political action. The younger
romantics are Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats, whose political attitudes were
distinctly more liberal than the later views of their forerunners, especially Wordsworth,
Coleridge, and Robert Southey, by whom they were clearly influenced but of whom they were
often scornfully critical. (Thompson, E.P. Pgs.127-136)
English romanticism is distinguished for its lyric poetry: Blake's The Tyger and London,
Wordworth's Tintern Abbey and his Intimations ode, Coleridge's Frost at Midnight and
Dejection, Shelley's Ode to the West Wind and Adonais, Keats's Ode to a Nightingale and 
Ode on a Grecian Urn, and Byron's She Walks in Beauty are among the most celebrated poems
in the language. English romantic poets also aspired to creation on a greater scale, as
seen in Wordsworth's The Prelude, the 14-book narrative of his own poetic development,
Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and Shelley's ambitious verse-drama Prometheus
Unbound.
English romanticism is also remarkable for its prose writing, especially its literary
criticism and its fiction. Romantic criticism is best represented by Coleridge's
Biographia Literaria (1817), which develops his theory of the imagination; Shelley's
Defense of Poetry (1821), which articulates the role of the poet as the unacknowledged
legislator of mankind; and The Spirit of the Age (1825) by William Hazlitt, which in a
series of profiles which traces the connections among politics, society, and the arts.
English romantic fiction is dominated by three figures. Sir Walter Scott was already an
enormously successful poet when he published his first novel, Waverley, in 1814. The
string of Waverley novels that followed feature historical settings and central
characters caught between two cultures. With the possible exception of Byron, Scott
exerted more worldwide influence than any other British romantic writer. The world
represented by Jane Austen is smaller in scale but equally important. "Austen perfected
the domestic novel, concentrating on details of character and carefully nuanced
dialogue." Pride and Prejudice (1813) remains one of the world's best-loved novels.
Finally, in Frankenstein (1818), Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley invented the form known
today as science fiction.(Thompson, E.P. Pgs. Many)
The second phase of Romanticism, comprising the period from about 1805 to the 1830s, was
marked by a quickening of cultural nationalism and a new attention to national origins,
as attested by the collection and imitation of native folklore, folk ballads and poetry,
folk dance and music, and even previously ignored medieval and Renaissance works. Sir
Walter Scott, who invented the historical novel, translated the revived historical
appreciation into imaginative writing. At about this same time English Romantic poetry
had reached its zenith in the works of John Keats, Lord Byron, and Percy Bysshe Shelley.
(Thompson, E.P. Pg. 143)
Despite having been both the country whose political events most clearly shaped European
romanticism and the working home of the movement's philosophic progenitor, Swiss-born
Jean Jacques Rousseau, France experienced a late flowering of romanticism, which did not
reach its peak until the 1830s and '40s, when its force had weakened in England and
Germany. (Barzun, Jaques. Pg. 124)
Reasons for this lie in France's having been the center of the Enlightenment thought and
its having served throughout the Revolutionary period as a test bed for progressive
ideology. Bitter controversies involving political and religious loyalties accompanied
the emergence of romanticism in France. The main fight took place in the theater. It
included disruptions of performances of William Shakespeare's plays in 1822 and
culminated in the notorious battle between the warring parties on the opening night of
Victor Hugo's drama Hernani (1830). The lyric poetry of Alphonse de Lamartine, Musset,
and Hugo was romantic in its pronounced personal emotionality and led, inevitably, to
Charles Baudelaire's Fleurs du mal , perhaps French romanticism's most extreme
expression.(Barzun, Jaques. Pgs. Many)
A famous by-product of the Romantic interest in the emotional were works dealing with the
supernatural, the weird, and the horrible, as in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and works by
C.R. Maturin, the Marquis de Sade, and E.T.A. Hoffmann. Achim von Arnim, Clemens
Brentano, J.J. von Gorres, and Joseph von Eichendorff dominated the second phase of
Romanticism in Germany. (Abrams, M.H. Pgs 362-363)
By the 1820s Romanticism had broadened to embrace the literatures of almost all of
Europe. In this later, second, phase, the movement was less universal in approach and
concentrated more on exploring each nation's historical and cultural inheritance and on
examining the passions and struggles of exceptional individuals. (Frenz, Horst and
Stallknecht, Newton P. Pgs 289-290)
A brief survey of Romantic or Romantic-influenced writers across the Continent would have
to include Thomas De Quincey, William Hazlitt, and the Bronte sisters in England; Victor
Hugo, Alfred de Vigny, Alphonse de Lamartine, Alfred de Musset, Stendhal, Prosper
Merimee, Alexandre Dumas (Dumas Pere), and Theophile Gautier in France. Alessandro
Manzoni and Giacomo Leopardi in Italy; Aleksandr Pushkin and Mikhail Lermontov in Russia;
Jose de Espronceda and Angel de Saavedra in Spain; Adam Mickiewicz in Poland; and almost
all of the important writers in pre-Civil War America.(Frenz, Horst and Stallknecht,
Newton P.)
Romanticism destroyed the clear simplicity and unity of thought which characterized the
eighteenth century. There was no longer one philosophy, which expressed all the aims and
ideals of Western Civilization. Romanticism provided a more complex, but truer, view of
the real world.
Bibliography
Abrams, M.H. Natural Supernaturalism. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1971.
Barzun, Jaques. Classic Romantic and Modern. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1943.
Frenz, Horst & Stallknecht, Newton P. Comparative Literature. London: Feffer & Simons,
Inc, 1971
Thompson, E.P. The Romantics: England in a Revolutionary Age. New York: The New Press,
1997.
www.go.grolier.com/romanticism