essay on romanticism

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Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History Essays

• Romanticism

Théodore Gericault

Evening: Landscape with an Aqueduct

Alfred Dedreux (1810–1860) as a Child

The Start of the Race of the Riderless Horses

Horace Vernet

Jean-Louis-André-Théodore Gericault (1791–1824)

Inundated Ruins of a Monastery

Karl Blechen

Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop's Grounds

John Constable

Eugène Delacroix

Royal Tiger

Stormy Coast Scene after a Shipwreck

French Painter

Mother and Child by the Sea

Johan Christian Dahl

The Natchez

Wanderer in the Storm

Julius von Leypold

The Abduction of Rebecca

Jewish Woman of Algiers Seated on the Ground

Théodore Chassériau

The Virgin Adoring the Host

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres

Ovid among the Scythians

Kathryn Calley Galitz Department of European Paintings, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

October 2004

Romanticism, first defined as an aesthetic in literary criticism around 1800, gained momentum as an artistic movement in France and Britain in the early decades of the nineteenth century and flourished until mid-century. With its emphasis on the imagination and emotion, Romanticism emerged as a response to the disillusionment with the Enlightenment values of reason and order in the aftermath of the French Revolution of 1789. Though often posited in opposition to Neoclassicism , early Romanticism was shaped largely by artists trained in Jacques Louis David’s studio, including Baron Antoine Jean Gros, Anne Louis Girodet-Trioson, and Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres. This blurring of stylistic boundaries is best expressed in Ingres’ Apotheosis of Homer and Eugène Delacroix’s Death of Sardanapalus (both Museé du Louvre, Paris), which polarized the public at the Salon of 1827 in Paris. While Ingres’ work seemingly embodied the ordered classicism of David in contrast to the disorder and tumult of Delacroix, in fact both works draw from the Davidian tradition but each ultimately subverts that model, asserting the originality of the artist—a central notion of Romanticism.

In Romantic art, nature—with its uncontrollable power, unpredictability, and potential for cataclysmic extremes—offered an alternative to the ordered world of Enlightenment thought. The violent and terrifying images of nature conjured by Romantic artists recall the eighteenth-century aesthetic of the Sublime. As articulated by the British statesman Edmund Burke in a 1757 treatise and echoed by the French philosopher Denis Diderot a decade later, “all that stuns the soul, all that imprints a feeling of terror, leads to the sublime.” In French and British painting of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the recurrence of images of shipwrecks ( 2003.42.56 ) and other representations of man’s struggle against the awesome power of nature manifest this sensibility. Scenes of shipwrecks culminated in 1819 with Théodore Gericault’s strikingly original Raft of the Medusa (Louvre), based on a contemporary event. In its horrifying explicitness, emotional intensity, and conspicuous lack of a hero, The Raft of the Medusa became an icon of the emerging Romantic style. Similarly, J. M. W. Turner’s 1812 depiction of Hannibal and his army crossing the Alps (Tate, London), in which the general and his troops are dwarfed by the overwhelming scale of the landscape and engulfed in the swirling vortex of snow, embodies the Romantic sensibility in landscape painting. Gericault also explored the Romantic landscape in a series of views representing different times of day; in Evening: Landscape with an Aqueduct ( 1989.183 ), the dramatic sky, blasted tree, and classical ruins evoke a sense of melancholic reverie.

Another facet of the Romantic attitude toward nature emerges in the landscapes of John Constable , whose art expresses his response to his native English countryside. For his major paintings, Constable executed full-scale sketches, as in a view of Salisbury Cathedral ( 50.145.8 ); he wrote that a sketch represents “nothing but one state of mind—that which you were in at the time.” When his landscapes were exhibited in Paris at the Salon of 1824, critics and artists embraced his art as “nature itself.” Constable’s subjective, highly personal view of nature accords with the individuality that is a central tenet of Romanticism.

This interest in the individual and subjective—at odds with eighteenth-century rationalism—is mirrored in the Romantic approach to portraiture. Traditionally, records of individual likeness, portraits became vehicles for expressing a range of psychological and emotional states in the hands of Romantic painters. Gericault probed the extremes of mental illness in his portraits of psychiatric patients, as well as the darker side of childhood in his unconventional portrayals of children. In his portrait of Alfred Dedreux ( 41.17 ), a young boy of about five or six, the child appears intensely serious, more adult than childlike, while the dark clouds in the background convey an unsettling, ominous quality.

Such explorations of emotional states extended into the animal kingdom, marking the Romantic fascination with animals as both forces of nature and metaphors for human behavior. This curiosity is manifest in the sketches of wild animals done in the menageries of Paris and London in the 1820s by artists such as Delacroix, Antoine-Louis Barye, and Edwin Landseer. Gericault depicted horses of all breeds—from workhorses to racehorses—in his work. Lord Byron’s 1819 tale of Mazeppa tied to a wild horse captivated Romantic artists from Delacroix to Théodore Chassériau, who exploited the violence and passion inherent in the story. Similarly, Horace Vernet, who exhibited two scenes from Mazeppa in the Salon of 1827 (both Musée Calvet, Avignon), also painted the riderless horse race that marked the end of the Roman Carnival, which he witnessed during his 1820 visit to Rome. His oil sketch ( 87.15.47 ) captures the frenetic energy of the spectacle, just before the start of the race. Images of wild, unbridled animals evoked primal states that stirred the Romantic imagination.

Along with plumbing emotional and behavioral extremes, Romantic artists expanded the repertoire of subject matter, rejecting the didacticism of Neoclassical history painting in favor of imaginary and exotic subjects. Orientalism and the worlds of literature stimulated new dialogues with the past as well as the present. Ingres’ sinuous odalisques ( 38.65 ) reflect the contemporary fascination with the exoticism of the harem, albeit a purely imagined Orient, as he never traveled beyond Italy. In 1832, Delacroix journeyed to Morocco, and his trip to North Africa prompted other artists to follow. In 1846, Chassériau documented his visit to Algeria in notebooks filled with watercolors and drawings, which later served as models for paintings done in his Paris studio ( 64.188 ). Literature offered an alternative form of escapism. The novels of Sir Walter Scott, the poetry of Lord Byron, and the drama of Shakespeare transported art to other worlds and eras. Medieval England is the setting of Delacroix’s tumultuous Abduction of Rebecca ( 03.30 ), which illustrates an episode from Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe .

In its stylistic diversity and range of subjects, Romanticism defies simple categorization. As the poet and critic Charles Baudelaire wrote in 1846, “Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject nor in exact truth, but in a way of feeling.”

Galitz, Kathryn Calley. “Romanticism.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History . New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/roma/hd_roma.htm (October 2004)

Further Reading

Brookner, Anita. Romanticism and Its Discontents . New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux; : , 2000.

Honour, Hugh. Romanticism . New York: Harper & Row, 1979.

Additional Essays by Kathryn Calley Galitz

• Galitz, Kathryn Calley. “ The Legacy of Jacques Louis David (1748–1825) .” (October 2004)
• Galitz, Kathryn Calley. “ Gustave Courbet (1819–1877) .” (May 2009)
• Galitz, Kathryn Calley. “ The French Academy in Rome .” (October 2003)

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Romanticism Essay | Essay on Romanticism for Students and Children in English

February 13, 2024 by Prasanna

Romanticism Essay:  Romanticism was an artistic, intellectual, literary and musical movement that took place in Europe towards the end of the eighteenth century and mid-nineteenth century. This artistic movement was at its peak in most areas in the approximate period of 1800 to 1850.

The prominence can characterise Romanticism it gave to emotional sensitivity and individual subjectivity along with the glorification of all the nature and past preferring the medieval rather than the classical. For Romantics, imagination was the most important creative faculty, rather than reason.

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Long and Short Essays on Romanticism for Students and Kids in English

We are providing students with essay samples on a long essay of 500 words and a short essay of 150 words on the topic Romanticism for reference.

Long Essay on Romanticism 500 Words in English

Long Essay on Romanticism is usually given to classes 7, 8, 9, and 10.

Romanticism was an artistic period of attitude or intellectual orientation that was characterised by several works of literature music, painting, architecture, criticism and historiography in the Western Civilisation over a time period from the late 18th century to the mid-19th century.

Romanticism was first defined as the aesthetic in literary criticism around the 1800s, and it gained momentum as an artistic movement in Britain and France. Romanticism was partly a reaction to the Industrial Revolution, the political norms and noble social of the Age of Enlightenment and the scientific rationalisation of nature – all elements of modernity. It was embodied most strongly in literature, visual arts and music but had a major impact on chess, natural sciences, social sciences and education. It also had a remarkable and complex effect on politics with the romantic thinkers influencing nationalism, liberalism, conservatism and radicalism.

Romanticism can be seen as a rejection of the perception of harmony, order, calm, idealisation, balance and rationality. This typified Classism in general and Neoclassicism in particular in the late 18th century. Romanticism was also an aftermath of the French Revolution that took place in 1789. Even though often predicted as the opposition of Neoclassicism, early stages of Romanticism was shaped largely by artists trained in Jacques Louis David’s studio, including Anne Louis Girodet-Trioson, Baron Antoine Jean Gros and Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres.

The movement emphasised on intense emotions serving as an authentic source of an aesthetic experience. It gave a new emphasis to emotions such as horror, terror, apprehension and awe – especially those experienced in confronting the unique aesthetic characteristics of sublimity and nature’s beauty. Contrasting to Classicism and Rationalism of the Enlightenment, Romanticism brought back medievalism. It also brought back the elements of art and narrative perceived as truthfully medieval in the attempt at escaping population growth, industrialism and early urban sprawl. Although this artistic movement was rooted in German Sturm and Drang movement, in which emotion and intuition were preferred to the rationalism of Enlightenment, the ideologies and events of the French Revolution also served as proximate factors. It elevated ancient customs and folklore to something noble but also spontaneity as a helpful characteristic.

Romanticism gave a high value to the achievements of ‘heroic’ artists and individualists, whose example it maintained would raise the quality of the society. It also helped in promoting the individual an individual’s imagination as a critical authority gave the freedom of classical notions of forms in art. The period of Romanticism had a few elements which stood out in the Western Civilisation. Romantics had belief in individuals and the common man, and they shared their love for nature. Romanticism showed interest in the past, supernatural, gothic and bizarre things. They had great faith in the inner experience and the power of imagination.

There was a strong recourse to the natural and historical inevitability – a spirit o the age in the representation of its ideas. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Realism was offered, which served as the polar opposite of Romanticism. The decline of Romanticism started during this time which was associated with multiple processes, including political and social changes and spread of nationalism.

Short Essay on Romanticism 150 Words in English

Short Essay on Romanticism is usually given to classes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6.

Romanticism was an intellectual as well as an artistic movement that occurred in Europe between the period of the late eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. Recognised broadly as a break from the Enlightenment’s guiding principles – which confirmed reason as the foundation of all the knowledge – the Romantic Movement emphasised on the importance of individual subjectivity and emotional sensitivity.

The nature of the Romantic Movement may be approached with the primary importance of free expression of the artist’s feelings. To express the feelings of the artists, Romantics believed that the content of the art should come from the imagination of the artist. Not specifically for Romanticism, there was widespread strong belief importance give to nature. This particularly affected the nature of the artist’s work, when the artist was surrounded by it – preferably alone. Contrary to the very social art of the Enlightenment, the Romantics were distrustful of the world, tended to be in close connection with nature.

10 Lines on Romanticism in English

• Romanticism is not an era that can be easily defined by its techniques.
• The principles of the age characterise this movement.
• Over science, reason and industrialisation Romanticism gave importance to spiritualism, emotions and nature.
• This period of artistic movement focused on freedom from authority over a traditional focus on society.
• The period of Neoclassicism corresponds with Romanticism only in the period.
• The ideals of the two movements Romanticism and Neoclassicism, were the direct opposite.
• Romantic music was technically adventurous and highly innovative.
• Along with showing the power of nature, many Romantic artists used their paintings to showcase natural disasters.
• Most famous Romantic art depicting natural disaster was The Raft of Medusa – a masterpiece by Theodore Gericault’s.
• Several paintings of the era dipped into fairy tales folklore and mythology for inspiration.

FAQ’s on Romanticism Essay

Question 1. Which is the largest defining painting of the era?

Answer: Francisco Goya’s painting El Tres de Mayo 1808 (May 3) is considered one of the largest defining paintings of the era.

Question 2.  What did Romanticism focus on?

Answer: Romanticism emphasised nature, emotions, individuality and spiritualism over industrialisation, science and reasoning.

Question 3. When did Romanticism begin?

Answer: The Romantic Movement began approximately in the year 1770.

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As a term to cover the most distinctive writers who flourished in the last years of the 18th century and the first decades of the 19th, “Romantic” is indispensable but also a little misleading: there was no self-styled “Romantic movement” at the time, and the great writers of the period did not call themselves Romantics . Not until August Wilhelm von Schlegel ’s Vienna lectures of 1808–09 was a clear distinction established between the “organic,” “plastic” qualities of Romantic art and the “mechanical” character of Classicism.

Many of the age’s foremost writers thought that something new was happening in the world’s affairs, nevertheless. William Blake ’s affirmation in 1793 that “a new heaven is begun” was matched a generation later by Percy Bysshe Shelley ’s “The world’s great age begins anew.” “These, these will give the world another heart, / And other pulses,” wrote John Keats , referring to Leigh Hunt and William Wordsworth . Fresh ideals came to the fore; in particular, the ideal of freedom, long cherished in England , was being extended to every range of human endeavor. As that ideal swept through Europe , it became natural to believe that the age of tyrants might soon end.

The most notable feature of the poetry of the time is the new role of individual thought and personal feeling. Where the main trend of 18th-century poetics had been to praise the general, to see the poet as a spokesman of society addressing a cultivated and homogeneous audience and having as his end the conveyance of “truth,” the Romantics found the source of poetry in the particular, unique experience. Blake’s marginal comment on Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses expresses the position with characteristic vehemence: “To Generalize is to be an Idiot. To Particularize is the alone Distinction of Merit.” The poet was seen as an individual distinguished from his fellows by the intensity of his perceptions, taking as his basic subject matter the workings of his own mind. Poetry was regarded as conveying its own truth; sincerity was the criterion by which it was to be judged.

The emphasis on feeling —seen perhaps at its finest in the poems of Robert Burns—was in some ways a continuation of the earlier “cult of sensibility”; and it is worth remembering that Alexander Pope praised his father as having known no language but the language of the heart. But feeling had begun to receive particular emphasis and is found in most of the Romantic definitions of poetry. Wordsworth called poetry “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling,” and in 1833 John Stuart Mill defined poetry as “feeling itself, employing thought only as the medium of its utterance.” It followed that the best poetry was that in which the greatest intensity of feeling was expressed, and hence a new importance was attached to the lyric. Another key quality of Romantic writing was its shift from the mimetic, or imitative, assumptions of the Neoclassical era to a new stress on imagination . Samuel Taylor Coleridge saw the imagination as the supreme poetic quality, a quasi-divine creative force that made the poet a godlike being. Samuel Johnson had seen the components of poetry as “invention, imagination and judgement,” but Blake wrote: “One Power alone makes a Poet: Imagination, the Divine Vision.” The poets of this period accordingly placed great emphasis on the workings of the unconscious mind, on dreams and reveries, on the supernatural, and on the childlike or primitive view of the world, this last being regarded as valuable because its clarity and intensity had not been overlaid by the restrictions of civilized “reason.” Rousseau’s sentimental conception of the “noble savage” was often invoked , and often by those who were ignorant that the phrase is Dryden’s or that the type was adumbrated in the “poor Indian” of Pope’s An Essay on Man . A further sign of the diminished stress placed on judgment is the Romantic attitude to form: if poetry must be spontaneous, sincere, intense, it should be fashioned primarily according to the dictates of the creative imagination. Wordsworth advised a young poet, “You feel strongly; trust to those feelings, and your poem will take its shape and proportions as a tree does from the vital principle that actuates it.” This organic view of poetry is opposed to the classical theory of “genres,” each with its own linguistic decorum; and it led to the feeling that poetic sublimity was unattainable except in short passages.

Hand in hand with the new conception of poetry and the insistence on a new subject matter went a demand for new ways of writing. Wordsworth and his followers, particularly Keats, found the prevailing poetic diction of the late 18th century stale and stilted, or “gaudy and inane,” and totally unsuited to the expression of their perceptions. It could not be, for them, the language of feeling, and Wordsworth accordingly sought to bring the language of poetry back to that of common speech. Wordsworth’s own diction , however, often differs from his theory. Nevertheless, when he published his preface to Lyrical Ballads in 1800, the time was ripe for a change: the flexible diction of earlier 18th-century poetry had hardened into a merely conventional language.

Useful as it is to trace the common elements in Romantic poetry, there was little conformity among the poets themselves. It is misleading to read the poetry of the first Romantics as if it had been written primarily to express their feelings. Their concern was rather to change the intellectual climate of the age. William Blake had been dissatisfied since boyhood with the current state of poetry and what he considered the irreligious drabness of contemporary thought. His early development of a protective shield of mocking humor with which to face a world in which science had become trifling and art inconsequential is visible in the satirical An Island in the Moon (written c. 1784–85); he then took the bolder step of setting aside sophistication in the visionary Songs of Innocence (1789). His desire for renewal encouraged him to view the outbreak of the French Revolution as a momentous event. In works such as The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790–93) and Songs of Experience (1794), he attacked the hypocrisies of the age and the impersonal cruelties resulting from the dominance of analytic reason in contemporary thought. As it became clear that the ideals of the Revolution were not likely to be realized in his time, he renewed his efforts to revise his contemporaries’ view of the universe and to construct a new mythology centered not in the God of the Bible but in Urizen , a repressive figure of reason and law whom he believed to be the deity actually worshipped by his contemporaries. The story of Urizen’s rise was set out in The First Book of Urizen (1794) and then, more ambitiously, in the unfinished manuscript Vala (later redrafted as The Four Zoas ), written from about 1796 to about 1807.

Blake developed these ideas in the visionary narratives of Milton (1804–08) and Jerusalem (1804–20). Here, still using his own mythological characters, he portrayed the imaginative artist as the hero of society and suggested the possibility of redemption from the fallen (or Urizenic) condition.

William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge , meanwhile, were also exploring the implications of the French Revolution. Wordsworth, who lived in France in 1791–92 and fathered an illegitimate child there, was distressed when, soon after his return, Britain declared war on the republic, dividing his allegiance . For the rest of his career, he was to brood on those events, trying to develop a view of humanity that would be faithful to his twin sense of the pathos of individual human fates and the unrealized potentialities in humanity as a whole. The first factor emerges in his early manuscript poems “The Ruined Cottage” and “The Pedlar” (both to form part of the later Excursion ); the second was developed from 1797, when he and his sister, Dorothy , with whom he was living in the west of England, were in close contact with Coleridge . Stirred simultaneously by Dorothy’s immediacy of feeling, manifested everywhere in her Journals (written 1798–1803, published 1897), and by Coleridge’s imaginative and speculative genius, he produced the poems collected in Lyrical Ballads (1798). The volume began with Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” continued with poems displaying delight in the powers of nature and the humane instincts of ordinary people, and concluded with the meditative “Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,” Wordsworth’s attempt to set out his mature faith in nature and humanity.

His investigation of the relationship between nature and the human mind continued in the long autobiographical poem addressed to Coleridge and later titled The Prelude (1798–99 in two books; 1804 in five books; 1805 in 13 books; revised continuously and published posthumously, 1850). Here he traced the value for a poet of having been a child “fostered alike by beauty and by fear” by an upbringing in sublime surroundings. The Prelude constitutes the most significant English expression of the Romantic discovery of the self as a topic for art and literature . The poem also makes much of the work of memory, a theme explored as well in the “ Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood .” In poems such as “ Michael” and “ The Brothers,” by contrast, written for the second volume of Lyrical Ballads (1800), Wordsworth dwelt on the pathos and potentialities of ordinary lives.

Coleridge’s poetic development during these years paralleled Wordsworth’s. Having briefly brought together images of nature and the mind in “ The Eolian Harp” (1796), he devoted himself to more-public concerns in poems of political and social prophecy, such as “Religious Musings” and “The Destiny of Nations.” Becoming disillusioned in 1798 with his earlier politics, however, and encouraged by Wordsworth, he turned back to the relationship between nature and the human mind. Poems such as “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,” “The Nightingale,” and “Frost at Midnight” (now sometimes called the “conversation poems” but collected by Coleridge himself as “Meditative Poems in Blank Verse”) combine sensitive descriptions of nature with subtlety of psychological comment. “ Kubla Khan ” (1797 or 1798, published 1816), a poem that Coleridge said came to him in “a kind of Reverie,” represented a new kind of exotic writing, which he also exploited in the supernaturalism of “The Ancient Mariner” and the unfinished “Christabel.” After his visit to Germany in 1798–99, he renewed attention to the links between the subtler forces in nature and the human psyche; this attention bore fruit in letters, notebooks, literary criticism , theology, and philosophy. Simultaneously, his poetic output became sporadic. “ Dejection: An Ode ” (1802), another meditative poem, which first took shape as a verse letter to Sara Hutchinson, Wordsworth’s sister-in-law, memorably describes the suspension of his “shaping spirit of Imagination.”

The work of both poets was directed back to national affairs during these years by the rise of Napoleon . In 1802 Wordsworth dedicated a number of sonnets to the patriotic cause. The death in 1805 of his brother John, who was a captain in the merchant navy , was a grim reminder that, while he had been living in retirement as a poet, others had been willing to sacrifice themselves. From this time the theme of duty was to be prominent in his poetry. His political essay Concerning the Relations of Great Britain, Spain and Portugal…as Affected by the Convention of Cintra (1809) agreed with Coleridge’s periodical The Friend (1809–10) in deploring the decline of principle among statesmen. When The Excursion appeared in 1814 (the time of Napoleon’s first exile), Wordsworth announced the poem as the central section of a longer projected work, The Recluse , “a philosophical Poem, containing views of Man, Nature, and Society.” The plan was not fulfilled, however, and The Excursion was left to stand in its own right as a poem of moral and religious consolation for those who had been disappointed by the failure of French revolutionary ideals.

Both Wordsworth and Coleridge benefited from the advent in 1811 of the Regency, which brought a renewed interest in the arts. Coleridge’s lectures on Shakespeare became fashionable, his play Remorse was briefly produced, and his volume of poems Christabel; Kubla Khan: A Vision; The Pains of Sleep was published in 1816. Biographia Literaria (1817), an account of his own development, combined philosophy and literary criticism in a new way and made an enduring and important contribution to literary theory. Coleridge settled at Highgate in 1816, and he was sought there as “the most impressive talker of his age” (in the words of the essayist William Hazlitt). His later religious writings made a considerable impact on Victorian readers.

In his own lifetime, Blake’s poetry was scarcely known. Sir Walter Scott , by contrast, was thought of as a major poet for his vigorous and evocative verse narratives The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805) and Marmion (1808). Other verse writers were also highly esteemed. The Elegiac Sonnets (1784) of Charlotte Smith and the Fourteen Sonnets (1789) of William Lisle Bowles were received with enthusiasm by Coleridge. Thomas Campbell is now chiefly remembered for his patriotic lyrics such as “Ye Mariners of England” and “The Battle of Hohenlinden” (1807) and for the critical preface to his Specimens of the British Poets (1819); Samuel Rogers was known for his brilliant table talk (published 1856, after his death, as Recollections of the Table-Talk of Samuel Rogers ), as well as for his exquisite but exiguous poetry. Another admired poet of the day was Thomas Moore , whose Irish Melodies began to appear in 1808. His highly colored narrative Lalla Rookh : An Oriental Romance (1817) and his satirical poetry were also immensely popular. Charlotte Smith was not the only significant woman poet in this period. Helen Maria Williams’s Poems (1786), Ann Batten Cristall’s Poetical Sketches (1795), Mary Robinson’s Sappho and Phaon (1796), and Mary Tighe’s Psyche (1805) all contain notable work.

Robert Southey was closely associated with Wordsworth and Coleridge and was looked upon as a prominent member, with them, of the “ Lake school ” of poetry. His originality is best seen in his ballads and his nine “English Eclogues,” three of which were first published in the 1799 volume of his Poems with a prologue explaining that these verse sketches of contemporary life bore “no resemblance to any poems in our language.” His “Oriental” narrative poems Thalaba the Destroyer (1801) and The Curse of Kehama (1810) were successful in their own time, but his fame is based on his prose work—the Life of Nelson (1813), the History of the Peninsular War (1823–32), and his classic formulation of the children’s tale “The Three Bears.”

George Crabbe wrote poetry of another kind: his sensibility, his values, much of his diction, and his heroic couplet verse form belong to the 18th century. He differs from the earlier Augustans, however, in his subject matter, concentrating on realistic, unsentimental accounts of the life of the poor and the middle classes. He shows considerable narrative gifts in his collections of verse tales (in which he anticipates many short-story techniques) and great powers of description. His antipastoral The Village appeared in 1783. After a long silence, he returned to poetry with The Parish Register (1807), The Borough (1810), Tales in Verse (1812), and Tales of the Hall (1819), which gained him great popularity in the early 19th century.

121 Romanticism Essay Topics & Examples

In a romanticism essay, you can explore a variety of topics, from American literature to British paintings. For that task, these ideas of romanticism collected by our team will be helpful!

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Literary Theory and Criticism

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Romantic Poetry

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on February 16, 2021 • ( 0 )

The classic essays on romanticism tend not to define the term but to survey the manifold and unsuccessful attempts to define it. In English poetry, however, we can give a more or less historical definition: Romanticism is a movement that can be dated as beginning with William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge ’s Lyrical Ballads of 1798 and that is still continuing today, despite reactions and countermovements which begin almost immediately and which are highly relevant to any consideration of Victorian and modern literature. (Although romanticism includes all of William Blake’s major poetry, beginning more than a decade prior to Lyrical Ballads, Blake’s obscurity limited his influence on other major writers for a good half century.)

Paradoxically, though, these reactions can themselves be regarded as highly romantic in nature— partly, perhaps, because one very general but still useful early (1825) definition of romanticism is, in the words of the French dramatist and politician Ludovic Vitet (1802–73), “Protestantism in arts and letters” (quoted in Furst, European Romanticism ). Protestantism was a protest against the fetters of the past (even romanticism itself)—against rule and convention, as Vitet realized—and therefore was also an analogue to the Protestant Reformation. In this sense, romanticism is the analogue in the literary sphere of the freedom brought by the Enlightenment in the political, moral, and philosophical world—according to Vitet, “the right to enjoy what gives pleasure, to be moved by what moves one, to admire what seems admirable, even when by virtue of well and duly consecrated principles it could be proved that one ought not to admire, nor be moved, nor enjoy.” Wordsworth, too, spoke of his object in Lyrical Ballads as giving pleasure to his readers, rather than conforming to rules: “There will also be found in these volumes little of what is usually called poetic diction . . . because the pleasure which I have proposed to myself to impart is of a kind very different from that which is supposed by many persons to be the proper object of poetry.” That pleasure is Protestant in its deference to the judgment and poetic conscience of the individual soul: “[T]his necessity of producing immediate pleasure . . . is an acknowledgment of the beauty of the universe, an acknowledgment the more sincere because it is not formal, but indirect; . . . it is a homage paid to the native and naked dignity of man, to the grand elementary principle of pleasure, by which he knows, and feels, and lives, and moves” (preface to Lyrical Ballads , 1800).

Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, by Caspar David Friedrich, 1818

Romanticism is therefore to be defined negatively, perhaps, as a principled protest against classicism. Since the French were the earliest to identify it as a movement, we can recur to the incisive definition one of the great French romantics, Victor Hugo, who (in the preface to his 1830 play Hernani ) wrote, “Romanticism, so often badly defined, is . . . viewed wholly under its militant aspect, nothing but liberalism in literature . . . a literary liberty [which] is the daughter of political liberty.” The philosopher John Stuart Mill was one of the earliest purveyors of the term in English, but again he was describing French literature when he wrote in 1837:

The stateliness and conventional decorum of old French poetic and dramatic literature, gave place to a licence which made free scope for genius and also for absurdity, and let in new forms of the beautiful was well as many of the hideous. Literature shook off its chains, and used its liberty like a galley-slave broke loose; while painting and sculpture passed from one unnatural extreme to another, and the stiff school was succeeded by the spasmodic. This insurrection against the old traditions of classicism was called romanticism: and now, when the mass of rubbish to which it had given birth has produced another oscillation in opinion the reverse way, one inestimable result seems to have survived it—that life and human feeling may now, in France, be painted with as much liberty as they may be discussed, and, when painted truly, with approval.

Mill’s account shows the extent to which romanticism was central to Victorian literary attitudes, even as the heyday of what came to be called high romanticism came to an end in England with the beginning of the Victorian period. Indeed, the Victorian parody of the continued influence of romanticism identified what it called the “spasmodic school” of poetry.

These quotations show the extent to which romanticism is regarded as a revolutionary rejection of the past—of Mill’s classicism—which might be regarded as the literary equivalent of the French Revolution. Indeed, the first generation of English romantics were admirers of the French Revolution before its descent into destruction and terror. For this reason as well, the romantics saw Napoleon Bonaparte as a Promethean figure who promised liberty but ended up besotted with despotic power. Wordsworth, who celebrated the death of the French revolutionary Robespierre in The Prelude, nevertheless began that work with an ode to liberty. For the English romantics, that liberty was at once a break with Enlightenment rationalism and (as we have seen) a continuation of the Enlightenment’s intensely humanistic project of rejecting religious superstition and arbitrary law on behalf of the human soul’s freedom and primacy.

It is important not to make the mistake that some critics fall into of thinking of romanticism as essentially an irrational egotism. Romanticism is far more the inheritor of Enlightenment ideas than their displacer. It shares with the Enlightenment an intense focus on the powers of the human mind. For Enlightenment philosophers, that focus was often on its rational and analytic powers, whence the flowering of modern science. But such Enlightenment figures as the philosophe Jean-Jacques Rousseau paid equal or greater attention to the mind’s subjective experience. Rousseau’s Confessions (1769) as well as his novel Julie (1761) were forerunners of intense influences on (respectively) such works as Wordsworth’s The Prelude , Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage , and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s T he Triumph of Life . In Immanuel Kant and the German idealists, and in Coleridge, much of whose work is uncomfortably close to plagiarism of the idealists, the relationship between its objective and subjective powers is central to a philosophical account of the mind. Kant saw that relationship forming in the faculty of judgment, of which aesthetic judgment was the most vivid example. The half-creation, half-perception of the world which takes place in judgment is the theme of romanticism, explicitly in such poems as Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” and Shelley’s “Mont Blanc.” Sometimes the difference between subjective and objective attitudes manifested itself as a sense of self-division within the soul, a sense that could be traced back to the philosophy of John Locke (1632– 1704), which was repugnant but therefore powerfully influential, to such figures as Blake and Wordsworth.

Self-division, solitude, subjective longing—all of these are aspects of the subjectivity which romanticism took as its starting point and theme (in part inheriting it from the more sentimental mode of 18th-century sensibility, though sensibility was far more an overtly social phenomenon than romanticism). Because of its intense interest in subjectivity as well as its rejection of superstition, it is possible to see romanticism as a kind of religious sensibility without religious belief. The soul, or self, experiences itself as fallen in a fallen world (often represented as the world of childhood or the world most closely present in childhood). In Romanticism, by rejecting the doctrines of religion—that the biblical Fall is punishment for some derogation from a state of grace—the soul also rejects the consolations of religion; accordingly, it has no hope of salvation except within itself and its own experience. That salvation is therefore primarily aesthetic and philosophical (the distinction between the two is one of emphasis, which is why so many romantic poems are so intensely philosophical). The romantics took to heart Satan’s claim in John Milton’s great 17th-century work Paradise Lost (the poem most essential to the English romantics) that “The mind is its own place and in itself / Can make a Heaven of hell, a Hell of heaven (1, l. 254).” Our sense of ourselves as fallen, as having a destiny and home “with infinity,” as Wordsworth says, makes the finite world a negative measure of our own subjective intensity. When this intensity is represented as a claim to greatness of soul, it can look egotistical; but what counts is the intensity of experience measured by the failure as well as by the intermittent success of the outside world at matching it.

This intermittent success tends to come with a sense of the grandeur of nature, which is why so much great romantic poetry is about nature in its most intense aspects: those of beauty, solitude, and most of all, the sublime. Nature’s wildness, partly imaged in ruined castles and abbeys, which had been a staple of gothic fiction in the 18th century were particularly appropriate settings for romantic thought. But nature is itself a projection—it is the place the mind makes of it, as in the last two lines of Shelley’s “Mont Blanc,” where it is the human mind’s imaginings that transfigure vacancy into silence and solitude.

The general mode of a romantic poem is one of crisis—a crisis that leads to its own solution. The very fact of crisis is a sign that the intensity of feeling and thought at risk is still there. Romantic poets worry about the loss of intensity that seems the inevitable course of human experience, but they reimagine that loss of intensity as the intensity of loss. Loss becomes, as the 20th-century literary critic Paul de Man put it somewhat skeptically, “shadowed gain.” The gain for the soul is in its apprehension of its own capacity to measure its losses, and therefore to rise above them. Loss within the soul comes to be figured as the loss of poetic vocation. The poetry inspired by this loss is a sign that poetic vocation is intensified in its own undoing, rather than dissipated— for a while at least. Romanticism reimagined poetry as an intense analysis of human subjectivity, and in doing so it lent splendor to the universal human experience of loss and decline. What more can poetry do?

Bibliography Abrams, M. H. Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature. New York: Norton, 1973. Bloom, Harold. The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1961. ———, ed. Romanticism and Consciousness: Essays in Criticism. New York: Norton, 1970. Brown, Marshall. Preromanticism. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991. Deane, Seamus. French Revolution and Enlightenment in England, 1789–1832. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988. De Man, Paul. The Rhetoric of Romanticism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984. Furst, Lilian, ed. European Romanticism: Self-Definition: An Anthology. London: Methuen, 1980. Lovejoy, Arthur. “On the Discrimination of Romanticisms.” PMLA (journal of the Modern Language Association) 39, no. 2 (June 1924): 229–253. McGann, Jerome. The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983. Mill, John Stuart. “Armand Carrel.” In Dissertations and Discussions. Vol. 1. 237–308. Boston: Holt, 1882. Quinney, Laura. The Poetics of Disappointment: Wordsworth to Ashbery. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999.

Romanticism in England

Romanticism in France

Romanticism in America

Romantic Literary Criticism

Literary Criticism of William Wordsworth

Literary Criticism of S.T. Coleridge

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Developing an “American” Literature

Introduction: romanticism.

The Romantic movement, which originated in Germany but quickly spread to England, France, and beyond, reached America around the year 1820, initiated with the publication of Washington Irving’s Sketchbook and lasting until the American Civil War. In America as in Europe, fresh new vision electrified artistic and intellectual circles. Yet there was an important difference: Romanticism in America coincided with the period of national expansion and the discovery of a distinctive American voice. The solidification of a national identity and the surging idealism and passion of Romanticism nurtured a literary blossoming sometimes referred to as “the American Renaissance.”

Romantic ideas centered around art as inspiration, the spiritual and aesthetic dimension of nature, and metaphors of organic growth. Art, rather than science, Romantics argued, could best express universal truth. The Romantics underscored the importance of expressive art for the individual and society. In his essay “The Poet” (1844), Ralph Waldo Emerson, perhaps the most influential writer of the Romantic era, asserts:

For all men live by truth, and stand in need of expression. In love, in art, in avarice, in politics, in labor, in games, we study to utter our painful secret. The man is only half himself, the other half is his expression.

Like earlier periods, this period’s assumptions are rooted in its views of human nature and truth. For the Romantics, human nature was neither born bad nor blank; it was born good, though it could be swayed from its essential nature by the pernicious effects of excessive rationalism or hidebound social mores. A period’s stance on human nature also affects its beliefs about the best ways to access truth. If human nature is initially corrupt, the sources of truth must be outside of it; if human nature is neither good nor bad but is accompanied by the ability to discern the workings of the world around it, then truth comes from the interaction of human ability and outside sources. For the Romantics, the essential goodness of human nature meant that the sources of truth could be discerned from within, particularly through imagination, feelings, and intuition.

Thus the development of the self became a major theme; self-awareness a primary method. If, according to Romantic theory, self and nature were one, self-awareness was not a selfish dead end but a mode of knowledge opening up the universe. If one’s self were one with all humanity, then the individual had a moral duty to reform social inequalities and relieve human suffering. The idea of “self”—which suggested selfishness to earlier generations—was redefined. New compound words with positive meanings emerged: “self-realization,” “self-expression,” “self-reliance.”

As the unique, subjective self became important, so did the realm of psychology. Exceptional artistic effects and techniques were developed to evoke heightened psychological states. The “sublime”—an effect of beauty in grandeur (for example, a view from a mountaintop)—produced feelings of awe, reverence, vastness, and a power beyond human comprehension.

As the reputation of human nature rose, so did the belief in the primacy of the individual over the community. While seventeenth century American literature most frequently warned readers to suppress self-interest in favor of the common good and eighteenth century literature presented the two as working in tandem, American Romantic literature valorized the drama of an individual striving against a repressive society. In addition, Romanticism emphasized idealism over realism. For them, literature’s purpose was not to represent the common and probable experiences of life or to teach improving lessons. Instead, literature’s role was to flesh out otherwise abstract concepts and accurately represent human emotions, what Nathaniel Hawthorne in his preface to The House of the Seven Gables (1851) calls “the truth of the human heart.” Finally, the Romantics felt that the essential goodness of human nature had a strong link to nature itself. Unlike earlier texts that portrayed nature as, at worst, aligned with malevolent forces and, at best, raw material existing to be used by man, Romantic texts often represented nature as beneficial and congenial to the human soul. It was a place of resort when man was in need of comfort or clarity and an antidote to the negative effects of science, reason, and tradition.

Romanticism was affirmative and appropriate for most American poets and creative essayists. America’s vast mountains, deserts, and tropics embodied the sublime. The Romantic spirit seemed particularly suited to American democracy: It stressed individualism, affirmed the value of the common person, and looked to the inspired imagination for its aesthetic and ethical values. Certainly the New England Transcendentalists—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and their associates—were inspired to a new optimistic affirmation by the Romantic movement. In New England, Romanticism fell upon fertile soil.

The following video more fully explains romanticism in American literature.

• Introduction: Romanticism. Authored by : Susan Oaks. Project : American Literature 1600-1865. License : CC BY-SA: Attribution-ShareAlike
• some text adapted from Becoming America. Authored by : Wendy Kurant. Provided by : University of North Georgia. Located at : https://human.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Literature_and_Literacy/Book%3A_Becoming_America_-_An_Exploration_of_American_Literature_from_Precolonial_to_Post-Revolution/04%3A_Nineteenth_Century_Romanticism_and_Transcendentalism/4.01%3A_Introduction . Project : Becoming America: An Exploration of American Literature from Precolonial to Post-Revolution, sourced from GALILEO Open Learning Materials. License : CC BY-SA: Attribution-ShareAlike
• video The Romantic Period in American Literature and Art. Authored by : Heather Carroll. Located at : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okPFcJntqFA . License : Other . License Terms : YouTube video
• some text adapted from American Literature I, which was adapted from The Romantic Period, 1820-1860: Essayists and Poets. From Outline of American Literature at https://resources.saylor.org/wwwresources/archived/site/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/ENGL405-1.1.1-The-Romantic-Period-1820-to-1860-Essayists-and-Poets.pdf. Authored by : Katherine VanSpanckeren. Provided by : Lumen Learning. Located at : https://courses.lumenlearning.com/americanlit1/chapter/reading-the-romantic-period-1820-1860-essayists-and-poets/ . Project : American Literature I. License : Public Domain: No Known Copyright

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ENGL405: The American Renaissance

The romantic period, 1820–1860: essayists and poets.

This article offers even more information about the romantic period in US literature. Many use the labels "American Romanticism" and "American Renaissance" interchangeably; as you dig into this course, ask yourself whether you see a potential distinction between these two terms and what each of them defines.

The Romantic movement, which originated in Germany but quickly spread to England, France, and beyond, reached America around the year 1820, some 20 years after William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge had revolutionized English poetry by publishing Lyrical Ballads. In America as in Europe, fresh new vision electrified artistic and intellectual circles. Yet there was an important difference: Romanticism in America coincided with the period of national expansion and the discovery of a distinctive American voice. The solidification of a national identity and the surging idealism and passion of Romanticism nurtured the masterpieces of "the American Renaissance". 

Romantic ideas centered around art as inspiration, the spiritual and aesthetic dimension of nature, and metaphors of organic growth. Art, rather than science, Romantics argued, could best express universal truth. The Romantics underscored the importance of expressive art for the individual and society. In his essay "The Poet" (1844), Ralph Waldo Emerson, perhaps the most influential writer of the Romantic era, asserts:

For all men live by truth, and stand in need of expression. In love, in art, in avarice, in politics, in labor, in games, we study to utter our painful secret. The man is only half himself, the other half is his expression.

The development of the self became a major theme; self-awareness a primary method. If, according to Romantic theory, self and nature were one, self-awareness was not a selfish dead end but a mode of knowledge opening up the universe. If one's self were one with all humanity, then the individual had a moral duty to reform social inequalities and relieve human suffering. The idea of "self" – which suggested selfishness to earlier generations – was redefined. New compound words with positive meanings emerged: "selfrealization", "self-expression", "self-reliance".

As the unique, subjective self became important, so did the realm of psychology. Exceptional artistic effects and techniques were developed to evoke heightened psychological states. The "sublime" – an effect of beauty in grandeur (for example, a view from a mountaintop) – produced feelings of awe, reverence, vastness, and a power beyond human comprehension.

Romanticism was affirmative and appropriate for most American poets and creative essayists. America's vast mountains, deserts, and tropics embodied the sublime. The Romantic spirit seemed particularly suited to American democracy: It stressed individualism, affirmed the value of the common person, and looked to the inspired imagination for its aesthetic and ethical values. Certainly the New England Transcendentalists – Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and their associates – were inspired to a new optimistic affirmation by the Romantic movement. In New England, Romanticism fell upon fertile soil.

Transcendentalism

The Transcendentalist movement was a reaction against 18th century rationalism and a manifestation of the general humanitarian trend of 19th century thought. The movement was based on a fundamental belief in the unity of the world and God. The soul of each individual was thought to be identical with the world – a microcosm of the world itself. The doctrine of self-reliance and individualism developed through the belief in the identification of the individual soul with God.

Transcendentalism was intimately connected with Concord, a small New England village 32 kilometers west of Boston. Concord was the first inland settlement of the original Massachusetts Bay Colony. Surrounded by forest, it was and remains a peaceful town close enough to Boston's lectures, bookstores, and colleges to be intensely cultivated, but far enough away to be serene. Concord was the site of the first battle of the American Revolution, and Ralph Waldo Emerson's poem commemorating the battle, "Concord Hymn", has one of the most famous opening stanzas in American literature:

By the rude bridge that arched the flood Their flag to April's breeze unfurled, Here once the embattled farmers stood And fired the shot heard round the world.

Concord was the first rural artist's colony, and the first place to offer a spiritual and cultural alternative to American materialism. It was a place of high-minded conversation and simple living (Emerson and Henry David Thoreau both had vegetable gardens). Emerson, who moved to Concord in 1834, and Thoreau are most closely associated with the town, but the locale also attracted the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, the feminist writer Margaret Fuller, the educator (and father of novelist Louisa May Alcott) Bronson Alcott, and the poet William Ellery Channing. The Transcendental Club was loosely organized in 1836 and included, at various times, Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, Channing, Bronson Alcott, Orestes Brownson (a leading minister), Theodore Parker (abolitionist and minister), and others.

The Transcendentalists published a quarterly magazine, The Dial , which lasted four years and was first edited by Margaret Fuller and later by Emerson. Reform efforts engaged them as well as literature. A number of Transcendentalists were abolitionists, and some were involved in experimental utopian communities such as nearby Brook Farm (described in Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance ) and Fruitlands.

Unlike many European groups, the Transcendentalists never issued a manifesto. They insisted on individual differences – on the unique viewpoint of the individual. American Transcendental Romantics pushed radical individualism to the extreme. American writers often saw themselves as lonely explorers outside society and convention. The American hero – like Herman Melville's Captain Ahab, or Mark Twain's Huck Finn, or Edgar Allan Poe's Arthur Gordon Pym – typically faced risk, or even certain destruction, in the pursuit of metaphysical self-discovery. For the Romantic American writer, nothing was a given. Literary and social conventions, far from being helpful, were dangerous. There was tremendous pressure to discover an authentic literary form, content, and voice – all at the same time. It is clear from the many masterpieces produced in the three decades before the U.S. Civil War (1861-65) that American writers rose to the challenge.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the towering figure of his era, had a religious sense of mission. Although many accused him of subverting Christianity, he explained that, for him "to be a good minister, it was necessary to leave the church". The address he delivered in 1838 at his alma mater, the Harvard Divinity School, made him unwelcome at Harvard for 30 years. In it, Emerson accused the church of acting "as if God were dead" and of emphasizing dogma while stifling the spirit.

Emerson's philosophy has been called contradictory, and it is true that he consciously avoided building a logical intellectual system because such a rational system would have negated his Romantic belief in intuition and flexibility. In his essay "Self-Reliance", Emerson remarks: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds". Yet he is remarkably consistent in his call for the birth of American individualism inspired by nature. Most of his major ideas – the need for a new national vision, the use of personal experience, the notion of the cosmic Over-Soul, and the doctrine of compensation – are suggested in his first publication, Nature (1836). This essay opens:

Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs. Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past...? The sun shines today also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.

Emerson loved the aphoristic genius of the 16th-century French essayist Montaigne, and he once told Bronson Alcott that he wanted to write a book like Montaigne's, "full of fun, poetry, business, divinity, philosophy, anecdotes, smut". He complained that Alcott's abstract style omitted "the light that shines on a man's hat, in a child's spoon".

Spiritual vision and practical, aphoristic expression make Emerson exhilarating; one of the Concord Transcendentalists aptly compared listening to him with "going to heaven in a swing". Much of his spiritual insight comes from his readings in Eastern religion, especially Hinduism, Confucianism, and Islamic Sufism. For example, his poem "Brahma" relies on Hindu sources to assert a cosmic order beyond the limited perception of mortals:

If the red slayer think he slay Or the slain think he is slain, They know not well the subtle ways I keep, and pass, and turn again.

Far or forgot to me is near Shadow and sunlight are the same; The vanished gods to me appear; And one to me are shame and fame.

They reckon ill who leave me out; When me they fly, I am the wings; I am the doubter and the doubt, And I the hymn the Brahmin sings.

The strong gods pine for my abode, And pine in vain the sacred Seven, But thou, meek lover of the good! Find me, and turn thy back on heaven.

This poem, published in the first number of the Atlantic Monthly magazine (1857), confused readers unfamiliar with Brahma, the highest Hindu god, the eternal and infinite soul of the universe. Emerson had this advice for his readers: "Tell them to say Jehovah instead of Brahma".

The British critic Matthew Arnold said the most important writings in English in the 19th century had been Wordsworth's poems and Emerson's essays. A great prose-poet, Emerson influenced a long line of American poets, including Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, and Robert Frost. He is also credited with influencing the philosophies of John Dewey, George Santayana, Friedrich Nietzsche, and William James.

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

Henry David Thoreau, of French and Scottish descent, was born in Concord and made it his permanent home. From a poor family, like Emerson, he worked his way through Harvard. Throughout his life, he reduced his needs to the simplest level and managed to live on very little money, thus maintaining his independence. In essence, he made living his career. A nonconformist, he attempted to live his life at all times according to his rigorous principles. This attempt was the subject of many of his writings.

Thoreau's masterpiece, Walden , or Life in the Woods (1854), is the result of two years, two months, and two days (from 1845 to 1847) he spent living in a cabin he built at Walden Pond on property owned by Emerson. In Walden , Thoreau consciously shapes this time into one year, and the book is carefully constructed so the seasons are subtly evoked in order. The book also is organized so that the simplest earthly concerns come first (in the section called "Economy", he describes the expenses of building a cabin); by the ending, the book has progressed to meditations on the stars.

In Walden , Thoreau, a lover of travel books and the author of several, gives us an anti-travel book that paradoxically opens the inner frontier of selfdiscovery as no American book had up to this time. As deceptively modest as Thoreau's ascetic life, it is no less than a guide to living the classical ideal of the good life. Both poetry and philosophy, this long poetic essay challenges the reader to examine his or her life and live it authentically. The building of the cabin, described in great detail, is a concrete metaphor for the careful building of a soul. In his journal for January 30, 1852, Thoreau explains his preference for living rooted in one place: "I am afraid to travel much or to famous places, lest it might completely dissipate the mind".

Thoreau's method of retreat and concentration resembles Asian meditation techniques. The resemblance is not accidental: like Emerson and Whitman, he was influenced by Hindu and Buddhist philosophy. His most treasured possession was his library of Asian classics, which he shared with Emerson. His eclectic style draws on Greek and Latin classics and is crystalline, punning, and as richly metaphorical as the English metaphysical writers of the late Renaissance.

In Walden , Thoreau not only tests the theories of Transcendentalism, he reenacts the collective American experience of the 19th century: living on the frontier. Thoreau felt that his contribution would be to renew a sense of the wilderness in language. His journal has an undated entry from 1851:

English literature from the days of the minstrels to the Lake Poets, Chaucer and Spenser and Shakespeare and Milton included, breathes no quite fresh and in this sense, wild strain. It is an essentially tame and civilized literature, reflecting Greece and Rome. Her wilderness is a greenwood, her wildman a Robin Hood. There is plenty of genial love of nature in her poets, but not so much of nature herself. Her chronicles inform us when her wild animals, but not the wildman in her, became extinct. There was need of America.

Walden inspired William Butler Yeats, a passionate Irish nationalist, to write "The Lake Isle of Innisfree", while Thoreau's essay "Civil Disobedience", with its theory of passive resistance based on the moral necessity for the just individual to disobey unjust laws, was an inspiration for Mahatma Gandhi's Indian independence movement and Martin Luther King's struggle for black Americans' civil rights in the 20th century.

Thoreau is the most attractive of the Transcendentalists today because of his ecological consciousness, do-it-yourself independence, ethical commitment to abolitionism, and political theory of civil disobedience and peaceful resistance. His ideas are still fresh, and his incisive poetic style and habit of close observation are still modern.

Walt Whitman (1819-1892)

Born on Long Island, New York, Walt Whitman was a part-time carpenter and man of the people, whose brilliant, innovative work expressed the country's democratic spirit. Whitman was largely self-taught; he left school at the age of 11 to go to work, missing the sort of traditional education that made most American authors respectful imitators of the English. His Leaves of Grass (1855), which he rewrote and revised throughout his life, contains "Song of Myself", the most stunningly original poem ever written by an American. The enthusiastic praise that Emerson and a few others heaped on this daring volume confirmed Whitman in his poetic vocation, although the book was not a popular success.

A visionary book celebrating all creation, Leaves of Grass was inspired largely by Emerson's writings, especially his essay "The Poet", which predicted a robust, open-hearted, universal kind of poet uncannily like Whitman himself. The poem's innovative, unrhymed, free-verse form, open celebration of sexuality, vibrant democratic sensibility, and extreme Romantic assertion that the poet's self was one with the poem, the universe, and the reader permanently altered the course of American poetry.

Leaves of Grass is as vast, energetic, and natural as the American continent; it was the epic generations of American critics had been calling for, although they did not recognize it. Movement ripples through "Song of Myself" like restless music:

My ties and ballasts leave me... I skirt sierras, my palms cover continents I am afoot with my vision.

The poem bulges with myriad concrete sights and sounds. Whitman's birds are not the conventional "winged spirits" of poetry. His "yellow-crown'd heron comes to the edge of the marsh at night and feeds upon small crabs". Whitman seems to project himself into everything that he sees or imagines. He is mass man, "Voyaging to every port to dicker and adventure, / Hurrying with the modern crowd as eager and fickle as any". But he is equally the suffering individual, "The mother of old, condemn'd for a witch, burnt with dry wood, her children gazing on....I am the hounded slave, I wince at the bite of the dogs....I am the mash'd fireman with breast-bone broken.."..

More than any other writer, Whitman invented the myth of democratic America. "The Americans of all nations at any time upon the earth have probably the fullest poetical nature. The United States is essentially the greatest poem". When Whitman wrote this, he daringly turned upside down the general opinion that America was too brash and new to be poetic. He invented a timeless America of the free imagination, peopled with pioneering spirits of all nations. D.H. Lawrence, the British novelist and poet, accurately called him the poet of the "open road".

Whitman's greatness is visible in many of his poems, among them "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry", "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking", and "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd", a moving elegy on the death of Abraham Lincoln. Another important work is his long essay "Democratic Vistas" (1871), written during the unrestrained materialism of industrialism's "Gilded Age". In this essay, Whitman justly criticizes America for its "mighty, many-threaded wealth and industry" that mask an underlying "dry and flat Sahara" of soul. He calls for a new kind of literature to revive the American population ("Not the book needs so much to be the complete thing, but the reader of the book does"). Yet ultimately, Whitman's main claim to immortality lies in "Song of Myself". Here he places the Romantic self at the center of the consciousness of the poem:

I celebrate myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me As good belongs to you.

Whitman's voice electrifies even modern readers with his proclamation of the unity and vital force of all creation. He was enormously innovative. From him spring the poem as autobiography, the American Everyman as bard, the reader as creator, and the still-contemporary discovery of "experimental", or organic, form.

The Brahmin Poets

In their time, the Boston Brahmins (as the patrician, Harvard-educated class came to be called) supplied the most respected and genuinely cultivated literary arbiters of the United States. Their lives fitted a pleasant pattern of wealth and leisure directed by the strong New England work ethic and respect for learning.

In an earlier Puritan age, the Boston Brahmins would have been ministers; in the 19th century, they became professors, often at Harvard. Late in life they sometimes became ambassadors or received honorary degrees from European institutions. Most of them travelled or were educated in Europe: They were familiar with the ideas and books of Britain, Germany, and France, and often Italy and Spain. Upper class in background but democratic in sympathy, the Brahmin poets carried their genteel, European-oriented views to every section of the United States, through public lectures at the 3,000 lyceums (centers for public lectures) and in the pages of two influential Boston magazines, the North American Review and the Atlantic Monthly .

The writings of the Brahmin poets fused American and European traditions and sought to create a continuity of shared Atlantic experience. These scholar-poets attempted to educate and elevate the general populace by introducing a European dimension to American literature. Ironically, their overall effect was conservative. By insisting on European things and forms, they retarded the growth of a distinctive American consciousness. Wellmeaning men, their conservative backgrounds blinded them to the daring innovativeness of Thoreau, Whitman (whom they refused to meet socially), and Edgar Allan Poe (whom even Emerson regarded as the "jingle man"). They were pillars of what was called the "genteel tradition" that three generations of American realists had to battle. Partly because of their benign but bland influence, it was almost 100 years before the distinctive American genius of Whitman, Melville, Thoreau, and Poe was generally recognized in the United States.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)

The most important Boston Brahmin poets were Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and James Russell Lowell. Longfellow, professor of modern languages at Harvard, was the best-known American poet of his day. He was responsible for the misty, ahistorical, legendary sense of the past that merged American and European traditions. He wrote three long narrative poems popularizing native legends in European meters "Evangeline" (1847), "The Song of Hiawatha" (1855), and "The Courtship of Miles Standish" (1858).

Longfellow also wrote textbooks on modern languages and a travel book entitled Outre-Mer , retelling foreign legends and patterned after Washington Irving's Sketch Book . Although conventionality, sentimentality, and facile handling mar the long poems, haunting short lyrics like "The Jewish Cemetery at Newport" (1854), "My Lost Youth" (1855), and "The Tide Rises, The Tide Falls" (1880) continue to give pleasure.

James Russell Lowell (1819-1891)

James Russell Lowell, who became professor of modern languages at Harvard after Longfellow retired, is the Matthew Arnold of American literature. He began as a poet but gradually lost his poetic ability, ending as a respected critic and educator. As editor of the Atlantic and co-editor of the North American Review , Lowell exercised enormous influence. Lowell's A Fable for Critics (1848) is a funny and apt appraisal of American writers, as in his comment: "There comes Poe, with his raven, like Barnaby Rudge / Three-fifths of him genius and two-fifths sheer fudge".

Under his wife's influence, Lowell became a liberal reformer, abolitionist, and supporter of women's suffrage and laws ending child labor. His Biglow Papers, First Series (1847-48) creates Hosea Biglow, a shrewd but uneducated village poet who argues for reform in dialect poetry. Benjamin Franklin and Phillip Freneau had used intelligent villagers as mouthpieces for social commentary. Lowell writes in the same vein, linking the colonial "character" tradition with the new realism and regionalism based on dialect that flowered in the 1850s and came to fruition in Mark Twain.

Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894)

Oliver Wendell Holmes, a celebrated physician and professor of anatomy and physiology at Harvard, is the hardest of the three well-known Brahmins to categorize because his work is marked by a refreshing versatility. It encompasses collections of humorous essays (for example, The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table , 1858), novels ( Elsie Venner , 1861), biographies ( Ralph Waldo Emerson , 1885), and verse that could be sprightly ("The Deacon's Masterpiece, or, The Wonderful One-Hoss Shay"), philosophical ("The Chambered Nautilus"), or fervently patriotic ("Old Ironsides").

Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the suburb of Boston that is home to Harvard, Holmes was the son of a prominent local minister. His mother was a descendant of the poet Anne Bradstreet. In his time, and more so thereafter, he symbolized wit, intelligence, and charm not as a discoverer or a trailblazer, but rather as an exemplary interpreter of everything from society and language to medicine and human nature.

Two Reformers

New England sparkled with intellectual energy in the years before the Civil War. Some of the stars that shine more brightly today than the famous constellation of Brahmins were dimmed by poverty or accidents of gender or race in their own time. Modern readers increasingly value the work of abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier and feminist and social reformer Margaret Fuller.

John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892)

John Greenleaf Whittier, the most active poet of the era, had a background very similar to Walt Whitman's. He was born and raised on a modest Quaker farm in Massachusetts, had little formal education, and worked as a journalist. For decades before it became popular, he was an ardent abolitionist. Whittier is respected for anti-slavery poems such as "Ichabod", and his poetry is sometimes viewed as an early example of regional realism.

Whittier's sharp images, simple constructions, and ballad-like tetrameter couplets have the simple earthy texture of Robert Burns. His best work, the long poem "Snow Bound", vividly recreates the poet's deceased family members and friends as he remembers them from childhood, huddled cozily around the blazing hearth during one of New England's blustering snowstorms. This simple, religious, intensely personal poem, coming after the long nightmare of the Civil War, is an elegy for the dead and a healing hymn. It affirms the eternity of the spirit, the timeless power of love in the memory, and the undiminished beauty of nature, despite violent outer political storms.

Margaret Fuller (1810-1850)

Margaret Fuller, an outstanding essayist, was born and raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts. From a modest financial background, she was educated at home by her father (women were not allowed to attend Harvard) and became a child prodigy in the classics and modern literatures. Her special passion was German Romantic literature, especially Goethe, whom she translated.

The first professional woman journalist of note in America, Fuller wrote influential book reviews and reports on social issues such as the treatment of women prisoners and the insane. Some of these essays were published in her book Papers on Literature and Art (1846). A year earlier, she had her most significant book, Woman in the Nineteenth Century . It originally had appeared in the Transcendentalist magazine, The Dial , which she edited from 1840 to 1842.

Fuller's Woman in the Nineteenth Century is the earliest and most American exploration of women's role in society. Often applying democratic and Transcendental principles, Fuller thoughtfully analyzes the numerous subtle causes and evil consequences of sexual discrimination and suggests positive steps to be taken. Many of her ideas are strikingly modern. She stresses the importance of "self-dependence", which women lack because "they are taught to learn their rule from without, not to unfold it from within".

Fuller is finally not a feminist so much as an activist and reformer dedicated to the cause of creative human freedom and dignity for all:

...Let us be wise and not impede the soul....Let us have one creative energy....Let it take what form it will, and let us not bind it by the past to man or woman, black or white.

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

Emily Dickinson is, in a sense, a link between her era and the literary sensitivities of the turn of the century. A radical individualist, she was born and spent her life in Amherst, Massachusetts, a small Calvinist village. She never married, and she led an unconventional life that was outwardly uneventful but was full of inner intensity. She loved nature and found deep inspiration in the birds, animals, plants, and changing seasons of the New England countryside.

Dickinson spent the latter part of her life as a recluse, due to an extremely sensitive psyche and possibly to make time for writing (for stretches of time she wrote about one poem a day). Her day also included homemaking for her attorney father, a prominent figure in Amherst who became a member of Congress.

Dickinson was not widely read, but knew the Bible, the works of William Shakespeare, and works of classical mythology in great depth. These were her true teachers, for Dickinson was certainly the most solitary literary figure of her time. That this shy, withdrawn, village woman, almost unpublished and unknown, created some of the greatest American poetry of the 19th century has fascinated the public since the 1950s, when her poetry was rediscovered.

Dickinson's terse, frequently imagistic style is even more modern and innovative than Whitman's. She never uses two words when one will do, and combines concrete things with abstract ideas in an almost proverbial, compressed style. Her best poems have no fat; many mock current sentimentality, and some are even heretical. She sometimes shows a terrifying existential awareness. Like Poe, she explores the dark and hidden part of the mind, dramatizing death and the grave. Yet she also celebrated simple objects – a flower, a bee. Her poetry exhibits great intelligence and often evokes the agonizing paradox of the limits of the human consciousness trapped in time. She had an excellent sense of humor, and her range of subjects and treatment is amazingly wide. Her poems are generally known by the numbers assigned them in Thomas H. Johnson's standard edition of 1955. They bristle with odd capitalizations and dashes.

A nonconformist, like Thoreau she often reversed meanings of words and phrases and used paradox to great effect. From 435:

Much Madness is divinest sense – To a discerning Eye – Much Sense – the starkest Madness – 'Tis the Majority In this, as All, prevail – Assent – and you are sane – Demur – you're straightway dangerous And handled with a chain –

Her wit shines in the following poem (288), which ridicules ambition and public life:

I'm Nobody! Who are you? Are you – Nobody – Too? Then there's a pair of us? Don't tell! they'd advertise – you know!

How dreary – to be – Somebody! How public – like a Frog – To tell one's name – the livelong June – To an admiring Bog!

Dickinson's 1,775 poems continue to intrigue critics, who often disagree about them. Some stress her mystical side, some her sensitivity to nature; many note her odd, exotic appeal. One modern critic, R.P. Blackmur, comments that Dickinson's poetry sometimes feels as if "a cat came at us speaking English". Her clean, clear, chiseled poems are some of the most fascinating and challenging in American literature.

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19th Century Romantic Aesthetics

Understanding romantic aesthetics is not a simple undertaking for reasons that are internal to the nature of the subject. Distinguished scholars, such as Arthur Lovejoy, Northrop Frye and Isaiah Berlin, have remarked on the notorious challenges facing any attempt to define romanticism. Lovejoy, for example, claimed that romanticism is “the scandal of literary history and criticism” (1960: 234). The main difficulty in studying the romantics, according to him, is the lack of any “single real entity, or type of entity” that the concept “romanticism” designates. Lovejoy concluded, “the word ‘romantic’ has come to mean so many things that, by itself, it means nothing” (1960: 235).

The more specific task of characterizing romantic aesthetics adds to these difficulties an air of paradox. Conventionally, “aesthetics” refers to a theory concerning beauty and art or the branch of philosophy that studies these topics. However, many of the romantics rejected the identification of aesthetics with a circumscribed domain of human life that is separated from the practical and theoretical domains of life. The most characteristic romantic commitment is to the idea that the character of art and beauty and of our engagement with them should shape all aspects of human life. Being fundamental to human existence, beauty and art should be a central ingredient not only in a philosophical or artistic life, but also in the lives of ordinary men and women. Another challenge for any attempt to characterize romantic aesthetics lies in the fact that most of the romantics were poets and artists whose views of art and beauty are, for the most part, to be found not in developed theoretical accounts, but in fragments, aphorisms and poems, which are often more elusive and suggestive than conclusive.

Nevertheless, in spite of these challenges the task of characterizing romantic aesthetics is neither impossible nor undesirable, as numerous thinkers responding to Lovejoy’s radical skepticism have noted. While warning against a reductive definition of romanticism, Berlin, for example, still heralded the need for a general characterization:

[Although] one does…have a certain sympathy with Lovejoy’s despair…[he is] in this instance mistaken. There was a romantic movement; it did have something which was central to it; it did create a great revolution in consciousness, and it is important to discover what it is. (1999: 20)

Recent attempts to characterize romanticism and to stress its contemporary relevance follow this path. Instead of overlooking the undeniable differences between the variety of romanticisms of different nations that Lovejoy had stressed, such studies attempt to characterize romanticism, not in terms of a single definition, a specific time, or a specific place, but in terms of “particular philosophical questions and concerns” (Nassar 2014b: 10, n.9).

This entry approaches the topic along similar lines in order to identify a cluster of related questions, concerns, themes, and approaches that are characteristics of the aesthetics of various romanticisms, and in order to bring out what is “romantic” in them. In lieu of a chronological, geographical, national, or figure-based organization, the following is structured thematically—it focuses on the central romantic commitment to the primacy of aesthetics (introduced in §1 ), and offers different philosophical explanations of this primacy (in the remaining sections).

While the German, British and French romantics are all considered, the central protagonists in the following are the German romantics. Two reasons explain this focus: first, because it has paved the way for the other romanticisms, German romanticism has a pride of place among the different national romanticisms (cf. Lovejoy 1960 and Berlin 1999). Second, the aesthetic outlook that was developed in Germany roughly between 1796 and 1801–02—the period that corresponds to the heyday of what is known as “Early Romanticism” [ Frühromantik ] [ 1 ] —offers the most philosophical expression of romanticism since it is grounded primarily in the epistemological, metaphysical, ethical, and political concerns that the German romantics discerned in the aftermath of Kant’s philosophy. [ 2 ] The entry elaborates on these concerns and explains how they shed light on the romantic understanding of beauty and art as fundamental in human life.

1. The Primacy of the Aesthetic

2.1 enlightenment and sturm und drang, 2.2 romantic poetry and romantic irony, 3.1 the absolute, 3.2 aesthetic feeling, 3.3 sui-generis normativity, 3.4 concrete individuality, 3.5 open-endedness, 4.1 autonomy, 4.2 bildung, 4.3 individuality and sociality, 4.4 political community, 4.5 late romanticism, 5.1 the worry, 5.2 romantic science, 5.3 art’s nature, nature’s art, 6. romantic legacy, primary literature, secondary literature, other internet resources, related entries.

One common concern strikingly unifies otherwise different romantic contributions. Early and late, German, British and French, the romantics advocated what may legitimately be called “the primacy of the aesthetic”. In romanticism, the “aesthetic”—most broadly that which concerns beauty and art—is not just one aspect of human life or one branch of the humanistic studies. Rather, if the romantic ideal is to materialize, aesthetics should permeate and shape human life. Friedrich Schlegel, one of the leading figures in Early German Romanticism, put this idea in a few memorable phrases: “The Romantic imperative demands [that] all nature and science should become art [and] art should become nature and science” (FLP: #586); “poetry and philosophy should be united” (CF: #115), and “life and society [should be made] poetic” (AF: #16).

Schlegel is not alone on this matter. Similar sentiments and slogans had been expressed just a little earlier in what is commonly regarded as the manifesto of German romanticism, The Oldest Programme :

The idea that unites everyone [is] the idea of beauty …I am now convinced that the highest act of reason, by encompassing all ideas, is an aesthetic act, and that truth and goodness are siblings only in beauty . (Hölderlin, in Bernstein 2003: 186). [ 3 ]

The British romantics have taken up and developed this view that the aesthetic is the foundation of knowledge and the pursuit of truth. “‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’—that is all//Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know”, Keats famously declared in the Ode on a Grecian Urn ([1820] lines 49–50, PJK). And in the Preface to Coleridge and Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads (1800), we read, “Poetry is the first and last of all knowledge—it is as immortal as the heart of man” (paragraph 20, in PWWW, I, p. 141).

How is this core feature of romantic aesthetics, the primacy of the aesthetic, to be explained?

A textually grounded and philosophically viable way to approach the imperative is as a structural or formal demand. On that reading, the imperative requires that we model our epistemological, metaphysical, ethical, political, social and scientific pursuits according to the form of the aesthetic comportment to the world, exemplified in poetry. On such an approach, rather than aiming to replace “real” life, science and philosophy with poetry, the romantics urge human beings to fashion their ordinary lives and to do science and philosophy according to the model provided by poetry. Philosophy, science and everyday life need not be poet ry , but poet ic or poetry -like . Structurally , they should become similar. Why so? The main task of this entry is to offer an answer to this question and to show that the reasons for “poeticizing” life, science and philosophy are philosophical.

2. Aesthetics and Reason

For over a century, romanticism has standardly been regarded as a reaction against the Enlightenment (e.g., Haym 1870). The primacy of aesthetics may seem to speak in favor of this story because, on this interpretation, the romantics replaced the Enlightenment’s faith in the sovereignty of reason with a belief in the sovereignty of art and the affective and imaginative capacities that are involved in aesthetic experience. On this traditional interpretation, romanticism is antirationalist or irrationalist. But, while the romantic pursuit of the primacy of aesthetics marks a break with the Enlightenment, regarding romantic aesthetics as antirational or irrational and as antagonistic to the core Enlightenment values is unjustified for a host of reasons (cf. Beiser 2003, Engell 1981, Gregory 2005).

First, the romantics’ focus on and praise for rational and autonomous criticism is continuous with the Enlightenment’s commitment to the value of rational criticism. Admiring Goetthold Ephraim Lessing’s ideal of criticism and his devotion to independent thinking, Friedrich Schlegel writes, “critique is the common pillar on which the entire edifice of knowledge and language rests” (Critique: 271). Rather than discontinuing the Enlightenment’s call to submit every belief and every action to the authority of rational criticism, the romantics are responsible for continuing “the age of criticism”—which is usually taken to characterize the eighteenth century—well into the nineteenth century. In that sense, they are the “children” of the Enlightenment.

Second, many of the core features of romantic aesthetics in addition to criticism—like the relation between beauty, truth and goodness, the pursuit of unity among variety and the significance of the imagination and the sublime—would have been impossible independently of key Enlightenment thinkers.

Third, the romantic elevation of aesthetic feeling and the creative imagination did not come at the price of their faith in and respect for reason. Even Friedrich Schlegel, who is often considered to be the most enthusiastically inclined romantic, opened his Lectures on Transcendental Philosophy by arguing that philosophy is “a striving towards a knowledge…of the whole person” (ITP: 241). In one of his fragments, he commanded: “Never tire of cultivating the intellect until you will have finally found what is original and essential” ( Ideas : #124). And yet in another fragment, he claimed that one of the two centers of genuine philosophy is “the rule of reason” ( Ideas : #117).

Such proclamations challenge the alleged break between the Enlightenment and romanticism as much as they challenge another standard interpretation of romanticism, one that takes it to be a direct outgrowth of Sturm und Drang , a counter-Enlightenment movement that flourished in the 1760s and 1770s. Briefly, this response to the Enlightenment, expressed in works of literature, theatre, music and the plastic arts, heralded individual subjectivity and the free expression of unconstrained feelings as the proper replacements for the values of the Enlightenment.

No doubt, the romantics shared with this movement the belief in a call “back to feeling”. But regarding romanticism as simply a continuation of Sturm und Drang finds no grounding in romantic texts. In his review of Friedrich Jacobi, one of the main sources of influence on Sturm und Drang , Schlegel declared, “Only when striving toward truth and knowledge can a spirit be called a philosophical spirit” ( Review of Jacobi’s Woldamer , KA II: 71–2). In the same review, Schlegel harshly criticized what is known as Jacobi’s salto mortale or “leap of faith”: this is Jacobi’s view that the only way to salvage our ethical and religious beliefs, in the face of the limitations of the Enlightenment, is to renounce reason in favor of mere sensation and faith. In contrast to Jacobi, the German romantics never attempted to replace reason with faith, sensation, unconstrained feeling or intuition. Instead, they wished to bring out the rationality of the passions and the passionate nature of reason as part of a unified and balanced picture of human life. Rather than a straight development of Sturm und Drang , then, romanticism is better understood as an attempt to synthesize the grain of truth in the movement with the grain of truth in the philosophy of Enlightenment, or simply put, to synthesize reason and sensibility.

Similarly, the British and French romantics did not mean to dismiss reason and replace it with passion and imagination, but strived after “a conjunction of reason and passion” (Wordsworth, “Essays on Epitaphs 1810” in PWWW). Accordingly, what Coleridge, for example, admired in Wordsworth was not imagination and feeling alone, but

the union of deep feeling with profound thought; the fine balance of truth in observing with the imaginative faculty in modifying the objects observed. (Coleridge, BL: Ch. 4)

The romantics, then, sought to supplement but not to supplant reason with the receptive capacities of the mind, primarily with the capacities involved in aesthetic apprehension and artistic production. They extended Kant’s renowned view of concepts and intuitions, suggesting that reason without feeling is empty and feeling without reason is blind . Without the former, human beings would be reduced to mere animality; without the latter they would lose their humanity:

We cannot deny the drive to free ourselves, to ennoble ourselves, to progress into the infinite. That would be animalistic. But we can also not deny the drive to be determined, to be receptive; that would not be human. (Hölderlin, Hyperion , HSA 3:194)

For the romantics, our receptive and spontaneous capacities could only be abstracted in thought, but not separated in reality: “Action and passion are inseparable as north and south” (Novalis, FS: #317). Human dignity is grounded in rational and normatively constrained receptivity just as much as it is grounded in spontaneity.

The restless striving after activity, the highest criterion of judgment, does not exclude all the virtues of receptivity but can only exist with them . (F. Schlegel, KA 12: 130)

Rather than dismissing the role and the significance of reason as such, the romantics challenged merely certain uses of reason—for example, dogmatic uses of reason, the laying down of absolute foundations, and system-building. And in a Kantian manner, they were concerned to expose the limits of reason and constrain its uses to legitimate boundaries. But even the romantic exposure of limits is, as it were, “aesthetic”. “Aesthetic?” one may ask. Yes, aesthetic in the sense that some of the romantic central devices for exposing the limits of reason are (originally) “aesthetic”, “artistic” or “literary”. “Romantic Poetry” is one such device and “Irony” is another.

“Romantic Poetry” is a notion that Friedrich Schlegel coined and described in most detail in Athenaeum Fragments (AF) number 116. Rather than a particular genre or kind of poetry, Romantic Poetry is poetry as such insofar as “all poetry is or should be romantic” (Schlegel, AF: #116). Romantic Poetry brings out the limits of reason in virtue of being reflective, “[hovering] on the wings of poetic reflection, and [capable of raising] that reflection again and again to a higher power” (AF: #116). Rather than being merely the “portrayed” object itself—a poetic representation—it “hover[s] at the midpoint between the portrayed and the portrayer” (AF: #116), and so, like Kant’s transcendental philosophy, reflects on the conditions of its own possibility and of human mindedness itself. It is not surprising, then, that Romantic Poetry is called “transcendental” poetry: “a poetry and a poetry of poetry” (AF: #238). Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister , a romantic favorite, manifests this dual reflective and substantive nature:

It was so much the poet’s intentions to set up a comprehensive theory of art or rather to represent one in living examples and aspects.…This might suggest that the novel is as much an historical philosophy of art as a true work of art, and that everything which the poet so lovingly presents as his true aim and end is ultimately only means. But that is not so: it is all poetry, high, pure poetry. (F. Schlegel, WM: 274)

The transcendental nature of romantic poetry suggests that it does not transcend merely the boundaries of a particular genre, but even the boundaries of the literary as such. Romantic Poetry is poetry as much as it is a philosophical method and a vital approach to human life. It is a creative and reflective human power, manifested in the theoretical, practical and aesthetic aspects of life:

transcendental poetry…really embraces all transcendental functions…. The transcendental poet is the transcendental person altogether. (Novalis, Logological Fragments : #41)

Romantic poetry is not alone in exposing the conditions of finite existence, but accompanied by an ironic way of living. Irony is a mode of self-restriction , whose “value and dignity” as a crucial dimension of human life, must be recognized (F. Schlegel, CF: #28). Irony is the balance between “self-creation and self-destruction” (CF: #28), which means that irony is creative—it is constructive of its own perspective on the world. But at the same time, it is also “destructive” of the pretensions implicit in any perspective—the pretention to be holistic. Irony thus presents its perspective as restricted—as only one among many different perspectives on the unconditioned whole. Accordingly, what romantic irony insists on through its restricting function is (a) the conceptual inaccessibility of the “Absolute” (explained in §3 ), and (b) what is known as “perspectivism”—the view that human beings are capable only of finite and limited perspective on the universe as a whole. Being ironic is a way of consciously and intentionally bringing out the fragmentary nature of the human situation as lacking a “view from nowhere”.

Like Romantic Poetry, irony is not merely a literary or even a rhetorical device. Nor is it a purely theoretical method. Rather, in a Socratic spirit, romantic irony is a way of life. For it is,

after all, for the artist as well as the man, the first and the last, the most necessary and the highest duty…most necessary because wherever one does not restrict oneself, one is restricted by the world; and that makes one a slave. (CF: #37)

Everyone, then, not only the writer, should be ironic. For, as exposing our finitude, irony is not only another romantic analogue of Kant’s transcendental method—the antidote to reason’s natural but spurious tendency to transcend its limits—but also an existential condition of humility (On irony see also CF: #26, #42, #48, 108; AF: 51, 121; and On Incomprehensibility ).

The romantic use of irony was sharply criticized, most famously by Hegel, as free floating form of subjectivity. But not only does this criticism fail to do justice to the romantic insistence that irony itself is a form of self-constraint, but also to the imperative: “Don’t exaggerate self-restriction” (F. Schlegel, CF: #37). This demand to constrain and regulate self-restriction itself is of equal importance to the demand to practice irony. Rather than a free floating form of subjectivity, then, romantic irony is a constrained, and normatively governed form of life, meant to expose the limits of reason and facilitate a life of humility (cf. Rush 2006: 187). Romantic irony is a commitment to the form of life that is governed by the acknowledgement of finitude; a “transcendentally-Socratic” life of humility.

Accordingly, rather than an irrational or an anti-Enlightenment stance, romantic aesthetics is marked by a respect for and devotion to reason and rationality “within their bounds”.

3. Aesthetics, Epistemology and Metaphysics

Even a cursory glance through the writings of the romantics assures the reader that their interest in art and aesthetics is closely tied to their epistemological and metaphysical concerns. The primacy that the romantics attributed to aesthetics is explained by (but is not reduced to) the roles that art and beauty may play in the pursuits of epistemic and metaphysical goals. One such goal concerns what the German romantics, and following them, Coleridge, called the “Absolute” [ das Absolute ].

Briefly, this is how this explanation goes: in the aftermath of Kant’s philosophy, the romantics were concerned with the Absolute, understood as the unconditioned totality of all conditions. Like Kant, they believed that such an unconditioned totality is inaccessible to discursive reason and is, to that extent , unknowable to human beings. But reason’s natural drive towards this “Absolute” is nonetheless significant and valuable ( §3.1 ). In aesthetics they found a mode of life that best approximates (even if never reaches or grasps) the Absolute, insofar as the aesthetic approach to artworks (a) includes indeterminate affective aspect ( §3.2 ), (b) involves a sui generis normativity, constituting its own norms in attunement with the artwork it faces ( §3.3 ), (c) is particularly suited to approach individual unities ( §3.4 ), and (d) is open-ended ( §3.5 ).

Most broadly, by the “Absolute”, the romantics refer to the unconditioned totality of all conditions. While the absolute itself is conditioned by nothing, it conditions all the finite physical and mental manifestations of the world. Inspired by Kant’s discussion of omnitudo realitatis —“All of Reality”—and by Spinoza’s all encompassing “substance”, the romantic Absolute is a whole, rather than an aggregate, that encompasses everything else, physical and mental: “Only the whole is absolute” (Novalis, AB: #454); “The universe is the absolute subject, or the totality of all predicates” (AB: #633). Metaphysically, every finite thing is merely one manifestation of an unconditional totality: only a single perspective on the whole. It is thus ultimately finite but also infinite, as part and parcel of the infinite whole.

This notion of the Absolute is not distinctively romantic. The German Idealists, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, were also concerned with related conceptions of the Absolute. But the romantic treatment of the Absolute is distinctively different from the idealistic one. And it is the distinctive romantic treatment of the Absolute that explains much in romantic aesthetics: While the idealists took the Absolute to be transparent to the human mind, conceptually representable, and inferentially related to other items of knowledge, the romantics regarded it as (1) ungraspable by concepts (i.e., as “non-discursive”) and (2) as non-foundational.

Following Kant, the romantics believed that all knowledge is discursive: knowing requires conceptualization. But since concepts condition everything that might be known by determining it to be one way or another according to the forms of discursive thought, the Absolute, by its very definition as unconditioned, cannot be known.

Knowledge [ Erkennen ] already denotes conditioned knowledge. The unknowability of the absolute is, therefore, an identical triviality. (F. Schlegel, KA 18: 511, #64)

The romantics further argued that the attempt to ground the whole edifice of knowledge in the Absolute—familiar to them from Fichte’s project, which they both admired and harshly criticized—is futile. Like Kant, they believed that reason’s natural and necessary drive to proceed towards the unconditioned can never be fully realized. The unconditioned totality of experience is “a regulative idea” (Novalis, FS: #472): it cannot serve as a systematic grounding of experience. As Novalis memorably puts it:

We seek the unconditioned [ Das Ubedingte ] and always find only [conditioned] things [ Dinge ]. ( Blüthenstaub , NS 2: 413, #1)

Skeptical as they were about the discursive accessibility of the Absolute and about its capacity to ground all knowledge, the romantics never questioned either its existence or the worth of (open-endedly) striving after it:

Neither our knowledge nor our action can ever attain the point at which…. All is one; the determinate line can be united with the indeterminate only through an infinite approximation [ in unendlicher Annäherung ] (Hölderlin, “Hyperion”, HSA 3: 326).

Therefore, philosophy, whose first theorem is “All is One and One is All” (F. Schlegel, ITP: 244), must be “a striving ” (ITP: 244). Even though philosophy cannot systematically deduce all knowledge from the Absolute, it must nonetheless pursue its approximation. But if not through concepts, how can one approximate the Absolute?

This is where aesthetics comes into the picture. Although scholars of romanticism disagree about the exact nature of the romantic approximation of the Absolute, [ 4 ] they widely agree that it includes a variety of feelings associated with the aesthetic, like aesthetic pleasure, poetic feeling, “longing for the infinite [ Sehnsucht nach dem Unendlichen ]” and “love”, and that it depends on the deployment of critical notions like “romantic poetry”, wit, irony, allegory, myth and the creative imagination:

If we abstract from all knowledge and will…we still find something more, that is feeling and striving . We want to see if we will perhaps find something here that is analogous to the consciousness of the infinite…. (F. Schlegel, ITP: 244–45). Poetry elevates each single thing through a particular combination with the rest of the whole, [by allowing] the individual [to] live in the whole and the whole in the individual. (Novalis, Poësie , NS 2: 533, #31).

The romantics believed that these aesthetic and affective attitudes make it impossible for us to deny that there is something “which is not I, nor comes from the I, and which is also not merely a Non-I” (F. Schlegel, Thoughts , KA 18: #83). Baudelaire summarizes these romantic sentiments, declaring,

The one who says romanticism says modern art—which is to say intimacy, spirituality, color, aspiration towards the infinite—expressed by all the resources of art. ( Salon of 1846 [1981])

What is it about the aesthetic engagement with art and beauty that is particularly suitable for approximating the Absolute? The rest of this section will develop a few possible answers to this question.

In the introduction to the Critique of the Power of Judgment , Kant writes that the feeling of pleasure in general, and aesthetic pleasure in particular, is the only representation that can never “become an element of cognition at all” (AK 5: 189).

One might think that feelings are thus placed outside of rationality. But this would be a mistake. On Kant’s picture, aesthetic feeling is rational insofar as it is grounded in a universal mental state that underlies our capacity to judge in general (the free play of the imagination and the understanding), and insofar as it is, through this mental state, responsive to the claims that beautiful objects make on everyone’s satisfaction (AK 5: 282). Rationality, then, is irreducible to cognition both in the Kantian framework and in its romantic inheritance. Aesthetic feeling is rational because of its ground and responsiveness to a claim, but non-cognitive insofar as it cannot be subsumed under concepts. Feeling does not determine any concrete property that its object has independently of subjectivity (as cognition would), but is rather responsive to a relation between a subject and an object. Aesthetic pleasure, particularly, is a non-determining mode of reflecting on the relation, not between a particular subject and a particular object, but between subjectivity and objectivity as such.

This rational but non-cognitive nature of feeling, in general, and of aesthetic feeling, in particular, is perhaps the central feature that renders aesthetic feeling an attractive ingredient in addressing the epistemic and metaphysical concerns that occupied the romantics. For while all cognition is determination through concepts, Kant’s aesthetics suggests a mode of reflective awareness that is not determining, but yet a way of being aware of and responsive to aspects of the world. This is exactly what the romantics have been looking for—a non-discursive, but rational and normatively governed mode of awareness. And they found it in poetry, regarding it as grounded in feeling:

Not art and artworks make the artist, but feeling and inspiration and impulse. (F. Schlegel, CF: #63) Poetry is passion. (Wordsworth, “Note to the Thorn” in LB: 136) All good poetry [originates in] the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. (Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800), paragraph 26, in LB)

If, then, feelings and passions are constitutive of art, and if aesthetic or poetic feeling is a key ingredient in the pursuit of the Absolute, then philosophy should become poetic and “poetry and philosophy should be made unified” (F. Schlegel, CF: #115). We are now in a position to appreciate that this romantic imperative is explained partly by the view that philosophy cannot be reduced to concepts and propositions, but must also include certain kinds of affective mental states. To paraphrase Wittgenstein, discursive reasoning comes to an end.

The non-determining character of aesthetic feeling is related to the distinctive kind of normativity that characterizes artistic production and aesthetic appreciation. An expression borrowed from Kant is fitting here: on the romantic picture, both artistic production and aesthetic appreciation are “lawful without a law”. Both are the source of their own normativity, without being subject to any external law. Given that, they are appropriate for approximating the Absolute insofar as this approximation must be non-determining (applying no conditions), but normatively governed rather than arbitrary.

Following Kant’s account of the genius, the romantics developed an understanding of the artist as, on the one hand, original and imaginative (rather than submitting to any law of nature or principle borrowed from the tradition of art), and, on the other hand, receptive to nature: “Every good poem must be wholly intentional and wholly instinctive” (F. Schlegel, CF: #23). This combination of being independent of given rules and attuned to something other than yourself is required not only for the genius, but also for approximating the Absolute. And it is this requirement that explains “the categorical imperative of genius[:] You should demand genius from everyone” (F. Schlegel, CF: #16). If everyone is to approximate the Absolute, then everyone should model herself after the genius.

Criticism consists of a related combination of features. While it is based on no prior rules, it is also open and receptive to the work it concerns. And it is through the engagement with the work that each critical judgment constitutes its own norms. Although we can and should legitimize our judgments of beauty and art, we cannot do so by appeal to any given concepts or norms that are external to the work at stake. The artwork, on this picture, is sui generis —it provides its own standards of appreciation: “Poetry is a republican speech: a speech which is its own law and end unto itself” (F. Schlegel, CF: #65). The critic should seek to express the work in a way that is faithful to its individual nature and be responsive to the specific norms that it constitutes:

To judge [Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister ] according to an idea of genre drawn from custom and belief, accidental experiences and arbitrary demands is as if a child tried to clutch the stars and the moon in his hand and pack them in his satchel…. Fortunately, [the novel] turns out to be one of those books, which carries its own judgment within it. (F. Schlegel, WM: 275)

That means that beauty makes demands on us, demands that, according to the romantics, are analogous to the demands that other persons make on us. Beautiful objects make a claim on us to respond to them as the specific individuals that they are, on their own terms: “See your statues, your paintings, your friends as they are” (Diderot, Salon of 1767 ). Hence, the romantic declaration, “one cannot really speak of poetry except in the language of poetry” (F. Schlegel, DP).

This lawfulness without a law fits the requirements of the Absolute. For, if we adopt this structure of normativity and expression in our pursuit of the Absolute, we may approach it in a normatively governed and committed way, without determining and thus conditioning it according to any given law, principle, or concept. Here, then, is another reason why philosophy should become poetic, and the true philosopher, not merely a “half critic” (as the romantics alleged against Kant), but a complete critic: philosophy should be open and attuned to the Absolute without trying to subsume it under any principle of reason, just as criticism is open and attuned to each work without subsuming it under any external law. [ 5 ]

Like Spinoza’s God and Kant’s omnitudo realitatis (All of Reality), the Absolute is an all-encompassing individual : while it comprehends everything else, the Absolute is also concrete. It is an individual whole—a totality, the parts of which could be understood only negatively, as its limitations. To approximate the Absolute, then, we need a mode of consciousness that is particularly suited to discern a holistic unity in an individual . While §5.3 discusses what is required in order to apprehend holistic unities, and the holistic unities of artworks and natural beauties, this section focuses on the individual character of artworks and natural beauties.

On the romantic picture, an artwork that does not present itself as a “living individual” (Novalis, Poësie , NS 2: 534, #35) is not worthy of the title of a work of art, and the one who does not approach artworks as unique individuals is not a genuine aesthetic critic: “Whoever conceives of poetry or philosophy as individuals has a feeling for them” (F. Schlegel, AF: #415). The aesthetic approach to beauty, then, is an approach to those things that are irreducibly individuals, those that should not be approached merely as ones of many—as instances of general kinds—but as concrete individuals: “Everything that is to be criticized must be an individual ” (F. Schlegel, FLP: #634).And this is the very approach that is required in the pursuit of the Absolute given its individual nature.

Kant attributes to aesthetic pleasure:

a causality in itself, namely that of maintaining the state of the representation of the mind and the occupation of the cognitive powers without a further aim. We linger over the consideration of the beautiful because this consideration strengthens and reproduces itself. (AK 5: 222)

Aesthetic feeling is open-ended and future-oriented. In contrast to practical pleasures (the “pleasure in the good”) and to private, sensory pleasures (the “pleasure in the agreeable”) that need to bring forth an action or an object in order to maintain themselves, aesthetic pleasure is self-maintaining. This is partly because aesthetically enjoying an object involves a commitment to remain faithful to the beauty of that object, beauty that calls for and deserves an open-ended affective pursuit. The romantics welcomed this structure of aesthetic feeling as particularly suitable for the pursuit of the Absolute. Since the Absolute can never be determined, the stance that approximates it must itself be open-ended. It should involve a commitment to keep striving after the Absolute open-endedly.

Since the romantics take philosophy to be a tendency “towards the Absolute” (Schlegel, ITP: 242), philosophy itself should be reconceived. The systematic search after first principles is not only hopeless, but also unfortunate. It can only slight the significance of the Absolute by the effort to determine it through principles. Instead, philosophy should be aesthetically shaped, as an open-ended pursuit:

If knowledge of the infinite is itself infinite, therefore always only incomplete, imperfect, then philosophy as a science can never be completed closed and perfect, it can always only strive for these high goals, and try all possible ways to come closer and closer to them. (Schlegel, Lectures on Transcendental Philosophy , KA 12: 166)

4. Aesthetics, Ethics and Politics

The intersection between romantic aesthetics, ethics and politics offers a particularly clear challenge to the standard view of the romantics as anti-Enlightenment (discussed in §2 ). This is because the romantics turned to aesthetics to a large extent in order to pursue, rather than to reject, some of the core ethical and political values of the Enlightenment, such as autonomy or self-determination and the ideal of Bildung . Art and aesthetics also provided a model for the romantic political ideal: a democratic, egalitarian community grounded in the republican values of liberty, equality and fraternity.

In addition to proving the anti-Enlightenment interpretation of the romantics false, tracing these romantic notions of autonomy, Bildung and political community also offers a challenge to another well-known interpretation of the movement as apolitical (see Schmitt 1986). In contrast to this interpretation, we find the romantics exploring and emphasizing the importance of aesthetics for ethical and political concerns. Shelley, for example, wrote in a letter to a friend: “I consider Poetry subordinate to moral & political science” (Shelley, LS 2: 71). In his famous Defence of Poetry (1821), he proclaimed, “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world” (SPP). Rather than “aestheticizing” politics, then, the romantics found in art and aesthetics resources for solving ethical and political problems.

Yet, a central difficulty facing any interpretation of romantic ethics and politics lies in the change that this view has undergone during the later years of many a romantic: the strong democratic and egalitarian views of the likes of Friedrich Schlegel and Friedrich Schleiermacher gave way to a growing conservatism and religiosity after 1800. The first generation of British romantics likewise turned from their conviction that to be young during the revolution was, as Wordsworth said, “bliss” and “heaven”, to an acknowledgement of the challenges awaiting a genuine political reform. With this shift in mind, they turned from political optimism to religion. A unified account of romantic politics is thus untenable. Instead, the section will focus on the political views of the German romantics during their “formative years” (from 1797–1800) and of the British romantics mainly during their early and middle phases This is because the ideals developed during these phases, though different from some of the later ideals, can shed light on the romantic path towards conservatism later on (Beiser 1992). §4.5 will briefly present the romantics’ later political thought.

“Freedom is the only reality in wishing, willing, sensing and striving”, writes F. Schlegel (TPL II: 155). While the absolute reality of freedom might not admit of a proof, according to many of the romantics, human beings should nonetheless approximate freedom by developing autonomy—self-determination and self-legislation. Autonomy is the right of the individual to think for herself and act rationally and freely (TPL II: 155). The work of art and aesthetic judgment were seen as paradigmatic expressions of autonomy and, as such, as splendid models for the cultivation of individual human autonomy. For (as discussed in §3.3 ) neither the creation of art nor its appreciation is grounded in prior given laws. And yet, both the production and judgment of art are not lawless, but normatively governed by the laws generated autonomously by each individual work and by each individual aesthetic judgment. Poetry is a “law unto itself”.

This characteristic of the production and judgment of art should not only be incorporated into the way every person is to govern herself—as the source of her own rational laws rather than as subject to external laws, and as self-determining rather than passively determined—but also serve as a model for the way in which every person should be respected and treated. Aesthetics provides us with a paradigm for following two central ethical demands—the demand to govern oneself autonomously and the demand to respect everyone else as autonomous.

These two duties, then, constitute another explanation of the “categorical imperative of the genius” previously mentioned—the demand that every person be a genius. For if every individual is to be autonomous, she should fashion herself after the model of the artist.

Bildung is another characteristic romantic value that each individual should develop in herself. While literally meaning “formation”, Bildung is best understood as a mode of ethical and cultural cultivation, or self-realization that allows the individual to mature into independence and responsibility. “Concerning Bildung , we speak not of external culture, but the development of independence ” (F. Schlegel, TPL II: 148). Bildung is a particularly modern value, formed at least in part as a challenge to what the romantics regarded as the rift between sensibility and reason in modern life. To achieve Bildung , each individual has to constitute herself as a unified whole that coordinates a balance between sensibility and reason: “The end of humanity is…to achieve harmony in knowing, doing and enjoying” (F. Schlegel, On the Study of Greek Poetry , in KA I, 627).

The artwork is a good model for such an ideal insofar as it is, according to the romantics, an organic and harmonious whole of diverse and even conflicting parts:

Poetry…must be a harmonious mood of our mind…where everything finds its proper aspect…. Everything in a truly poetic book seems so natural —and yet so marvelous. We think it could not be otherwise…and we feel the infinite…sensations of a plurality in agreement. (Novalis, Last Fragments : #3)

This is why “Every human being who is cultivated and who cultivates himself”, namely, the person who achieves Bildung , “contains a novel within himself” (F. Schlegel, AF: #78).

Aesthetic judgment is also a harmony of reason and sensibility. On this issue too, the romantics were inspired by Kant’s aesthetics, according to which aesthetic judgment consists in the free play between the understanding, imagination and pleasure. Approaching the world, ourselves and one another aesthetically, then, is approaching it with a harmony of “knowing, doing, and enjoying”. And achieving this harmony constitutes a genuine moral being: a balanced rational, sensible and affective person. For that reason, it is not surprising to find Coleridge, the critic, aiming to establish “the close and reciprocal connections of Just Taste with pure Morality” (Lecture I, CLL).

Romantic Bildung was a political ideal as much as it was an ethical one. It was needed, not only for the sake of independent individual responsibility, but also for the possibility of a genuine non-revolutionary republic:

There is no greater need of the age than the need for a spiritual counterweight to the Revolution and to the despotism which the Revolution exercises over people…. Where can we seek and find such a counterweight? The answer isn’t hard: unquestionably in ourselves…the center of humanity lies there. (F. Schlegel, Ideas : #41)

The French revolution had shown the romantics both the value of a republic based on liberty, equality and fraternity, but also the dangers of anarchism and strife that revolutions carry with them. The proper path to a republic, they thought, is not through a revolutionary act, but through proper education. Art does not only offer a model for a harmonious, cultivated soul, but is also the best medium through which to achieve the moral education that leads to this harmony and, on its basis, to the best republic. Attending to art (as well as producing it) is a form of self-cultivation because the spirit of art allows human beings to transcend baseness (a particular danger given modern instrumentalism and materialism), and to develop their humanity.

As we now turn to see, the romantics regarded art also as a particularly effective medium for uniting people, no matter their differences, and so took it to be a great spur for united, social and political action.

The allegiance to autonomy and to the value of Bildung may seem to indicate individualism. And it does, to an extent . While individuality is indeed a romantic value, anti-communal individualism is not. The romantics never celebrated uncurbed individuality, but called for a balance between individuality and sociality: “A certain regulated interaction between individuality and universality…constitutes the first condition for moral well-being” (F. Schlegel, OP: 427).

Without doubt, the romantics criticized Kant’s categorical imperative as proposing a problematically universalistic ethics that discourages the free expression of unique personalities. They viewed such a universalist ethics as problematic because they regarded individual expression and the development of a unique, characteristic and unified self as intrinsically and morally valuable. Yet, the romantics were also critical of extreme individualism, such as the one they found promoted by some Enlightenment thinkers. In other words, they challenged those individualists who criticized any form of social and communal participation as potentially a form of passive submission to external authority.

In response to these two extremes of universalism and radical individualism, the romantics sought after a golden mean—romantic ethics strived to preserve and strengthen social bonds and encouraged a pluralistic communal life while supporting rational criticism, autonomy, individual rights, liberties and freedom of expression: “Does not the universal gain from the individual, the individual from universal relations?” (Novalis, Faith and Love : #5). The romantics believed that individualism is not merely compatible with sociality and communitarianism, but that it actually depends on genuine forms of the latter: “The vocation of man is attainable only through human society” (F. Schlegel, TPL II: 144). Autonomy and Bildung , in particular, though nothing other than individual freedom and self-realization, can never be divorced from the social:

Autonomy should be universal and not relate to the individual but the whole, for otherwise it would destroy itself…. We cannot consider human beings individually . (TPL II: 156)

On the romantic picture, the achievement of free, fully-formed individuality is impossible independently of strong sociality and vice versa . An ideal of sociality is deficient if it leaves no freedom for the distinct expression and liberties of each individual, and the individual is most herself, as an individual only insofar as she freely interacts with others: “A person can be a person only among people” (TPL II: 145).

Rather than contradictory impulses, as they are often regarded today, sociality and individuality, on the romantic picture, are not only compatible but also naturally harmonious—grounded in human nature: [ 6 ]

No man is merely man, but…at the same time he can and should be genuinely and truly all mankind. Therefore, man, in reaching out time and again beyond himself to seek and find the complement of his innermost being in the depths of another, is certain to return to himself. (F. Schlegel, DP: 54)

It is this romantic view of natural human sociability—rather than some exaggerated zeal or effusiveness—that explains and is explained by the centrality of love in romanticism. In contrast to many a modern thinker, the romantics regarded love rather than self-interest as a basic condition of human nature (“Love is…the core of ourselves” (F. Schlegel, TPL II: 151)), and as the proper basis for a genuine sociable but pluralistic community:

Yes, love, you power of attraction of the spiritual world! No individual life or development is possible without you. Without you everything must degenerate into a crude, homogeneous mass…. There is no individual development without love, and without the development of one’s individuality there is no perfection in love. When one complements the other, both grow together inseparably. I feel united within me the two fundamental conditions of ethical life! (Schleiermacher, ”Monologue II”, 180).

But as natural as it may be, the romantics believed that love has suffered paralysis in modernity. On their view, the rise of capitalism and instrumentalism had suppressed natural social bonds and encouraged self-interest. The consequent view of human beings as solely quantitatively distinct further leveled them and inhibited their distinctive and unique expressions.

How could people balance individuality and sociality in the face of modernity? Here too romantic poetry and the creative imagination come to the rescue. Poetry is not only based in love, but is itself a form of love insofar as it bonds different individuals:

Poetry befriends and binds with unseverable ties the hearts of all those who love it. Even though in their own lives they may pursue the most diverse ends, may feel contempt for what the other holds most sacred, may fail to appreciate or communicate with one another, and remain in all other realms strangers forever; in poetry through a higher magic power, they are united and at peace. (F. Schlegel, DP: 53)

The poet is, quintessentially, “a social being” (F. Schlegel, DP: 55) insofar as he both expresses, “in lasting works the expression of his unique poetry” (DP: 55) and reaches to others and reciprocally communicates with them. The poet integrates:

his part with the entire body of poetry…. He can do this when he has found the center point through communication with those who have found theirs from a different side, in a different way. Love needs a responding love. Indeed, for the true poet’s communication…can be beneficial and instructive. (DP: 55)

Following the “categorical imperative of the genius” is required, then, also for achieving Bildung and autonomous individuality in and through society: it is an ethical and social demand as well.

While sociality and communal spirit are ethically required for the achievement of autonomy and Bildung , community was also a romantic political ideal. Such an ideal required that what the romantics viewed as modern alienation—estrangement of the self from others—be challenged in three ways: by promoting love (as discussed above), developing a sphere of free social interaction and pursuing a holistic, social unity.

The ideal political community must facilitate a sphere of social life, which is free and independent of political control because free sociality and conversation, the ends of this sphere, are both valuable in themselves and the best alternative for external laws. The romantics believed that social bonds should not be upheld by laws that are imposed on individual citizens from outside, but by the love encouraged by a common culture and free interaction. Romantic poetry is an exemplary model for achieving such a free domain since it is “a republican speech…in which all the parts are free citizens and have the right to vote” (Schlegel, CF: #65).

Aesthetics is at the center of this political vision also because the political ends of free sociability and conversation are the very same ones that the romantics practiced in their intellectual-artistic salons and in their communal, cooperative aesthetic projects. The political community should allow for creative and artistic endeavors such as the Athenaeum journal, which was the mouthpiece of the German romantics at the end of the eighteenth century and a journal that was independent of the control of the publishing establishment. It was written in collaboration (mainly by the Schlegel brothers, Novalis, and Schleiermacher), and aimed at rational criticism and Bildung . Such aesthetic projects are a model for the politician. This is because “sympoetry” and “symphilosophy”, as Schlegel and Novalis called such cooperative intellectual and aesthetic projects, should be an integral part of political life:

Perhaps a whole new epoch of science and art would be inaugurated were symphilosophy and sympoetry to become so common and deeply felt that there would be nothing odd were several people of mutually complementary natures to create works in communion with each other. (F. Schlegel, AF: #125)

The ideal political community must also be characterized by a specific kind of relation between the political body as a whole and its members: the state should be an organic or holistic whole, which means most broadly that the state as a whole must be prior to the parts (see Beiser 1992).

First, the best state is prior to its parts since, as we saw, it is necessary for individual identity and self-realization.

Additionally, the romantic community as a whole is prior to the individual citizens (i.e., its parts), insofar as genuine social bonds and a well-functioning political entity cannot be “constructed” out of separate self-sufficient and self-interested individuals (as the modern social contract theory has it). To properly function and achieve the ethical aim of sociality, the links between the political members should be organic: the members should not be connected to one another by an externally imposed social contract, but by natural love, affection and attraction. Unsurprisingly, it is through poetry that the familial-like bonds, required for the ideal state, should be developed over and above the unit of the biological family. “Within the family, minds become organically one, and for this reason, the family is total poetry” (F. Schlegel, Ideas : #152).

While the state as a whole should be prior to its parts in this sense , the law of such a state should not be imposed on its citizens from outside, but be self -determined. Individual autonomy should be supported by promoting the direct and active participation of all individuals in the political process. The organic unity of the state, then, implies reciprocity: the parts are dependent on and are posterior to the whole, while the whole, in respect of its essential self-determination, also depends on and is posterior to its parts.

The work of art provides, once again, the structural model for this political ideal by virtue of its organic unity, where “every whole can be a part and every part really a whole” (Schlegel, CF: #14). When genuine, art is characterized exactly by the kind of holistic, organic, but egalitarian and pluralistic unity that must characterize the ideal community:

Many works that are praised for the beauty of their coherence have less unity than a motley heap of ideas simply animated by the ghost of a spirit and aiming at a single purpose. What really holds the latter together is that free and equal fellowship in which, so the wise man assures us, the citizens of the perfect state will live at some future date; it’s that unqualifiedly social spirit…. (F. Schlegel, CF: #103)

An organic state is called for also because the mechanistic structure of the modern state is responsible for the decline of religion. This structure caused, according to the romantics, a form of “enslavement” and a faith in materialism and instrumentalism, both of which prevent people from cultivating their spirituality and relation to the divine. Both in their early and late phases, the romantics believed that poetry was the best way for inspiring spirituality and religiosity. “Every artist is a mediator for all other men”, writes F. Schlegel ( Ideas : #44), regarding this “mediator” as mediating between man and God. Schleiermacher confirms and develops this connection when suggesting that poets are:

the true priests of the Highest…. They place the heavenly and eternal before them as an object of pleasure and unity, as the sole inexhaustible source of that toward which their poetry is directed. They strive…to ignite a love for the Highest…This is the higher priesthood that proclaims the inner meaning of all spiritual secrets and speaks from the kingdom of God. (Schleiermacher, On Religion [translation modified]).

It is for these reasons that “at the time of the republic, the artists will not be a special class” (F. Schlegel, PF: #749). In such an ideal republic everyone must be an artist who, by means of the poetic spirit of love, is related to the other citizens as artists relate to one another.

Statements such as Blake’s claim, “Princes…and Houses of Commons & Houses of Lords [are] something Else besides Human Life” (“Public Address” (1809) in PPWB) clearly display the revolutionary nature of the romantics. But the romantic transition from a more liberal framework to a more conservative one is explained primarily by their reaction to the terror of the French revolution. Though many of the romantics kept allegiance to the revolution until fairly late (1798), the acknowledgement of its failures and the dangers involved in any revolutionary act led them to modify, though not to renounce, their republican ideal. Even during this stage of their development, the romantics believed that the republic offered the best political structure. But, while still involving democratic elements, a proper republic, they argued should also involve aristocratic and monarchical elements because the educated should rule over the uneducated:

A perfect republic would have to be not just democratic but aristocratic and monarchic at the same time: to legislate justly and freely, the educated would have to outweigh and guide the uneducated, and everything would have to be organized into an absolute whole. (F. Schlegel, AF: #214)

Rather than opposed to the original romantic ideal, this late view is a natural outgrowth of the earlier ideal since it does not only maintain the early republicanism, but also continues, through modification, the early romantic emphasis on Bildung as a necessary condition for a proper republic.

Since even during this later period, the romantic political ideal consisted of a republican, holistic community grounded in love, art and aesthetics still played significant ethical and political roles in the late romantic phase. Even later on in their careers, the romantics insisted that art and aesthetics were crucial models and resources for the pursuit of ethical and political ends.

5. Aesthetics and Nature

One of the romantics’ central aims was to (re)enchant nature in the face of what they regarded as a threat from modern science. The threat was embodied primarily in the worry that modern science alienated (rational and free) human beings from nature, which, through the lens of this new science, had been viewed as a domain of brute, determined, mechanical causality ( §5.1 ). Aesthetics is capable of (re)enchanting nature insofar as it brings out a different conception of nature as organic rather than mechanic. On this organic conception, nature is (a) an organic whole, which is reciprocally interdependent on its parts; (b) a domain of teleological rather than merely mechanical causality; and (c) a dynamic and living force, which is self-organizing and self-generating ( §5.2 ). “Science should become poetic” insofar as it should approach nature in the same way that criticism approaches romantic poetry. Like romantic poetry, nature should be viewed as an organic and spontaneous whole. Under this conception of nature, rational, autonomous human beings are not alienated from, but are rather part and parcel of, nature ( §5.3 ).

We have fallen out with nature, and what was once (as we believe) One is now in conflict with itself, and mastery and servitude alternate on both sides. It often seems to us as if the world were everything and we nothing, but often too as if we were everything and the world nothing. (Hölderlin, Preface to Hyperion , HSA 3: 326).

Hölderlin expresses here a ubiquitous romantic sentiment. Not only has modernity divided man from himself by enforcing the duality between reason and sensibility and severed the individual from his natural social relations (section 4), but it also alienated man from nature. Modern science, “[a] vulture, whose wings are dull realities”, was regarded as the main culprit (Edgar Allen Poe, “Sonnet—To Science”).

Through the lens of modern science, nature was regarded as an inanimate, mechanistic domain of dead and meaningless matter that is composed of separate atoms and thoroughly determined by efficient causality. Modern science “dissected [nature] atomistically like a dead corpse” (Eichendorff, EW 5: 423). The romantics regarded this approach to nature as reductive as much as they regarded it as “dissecting”: it reduces nature to mere matter, devoid of the features that the romantics took to be essential to it, like holistic unity, self-organization and life. The growing sense of man’s alienation from his natural surrounding was seen as a product of this reduction of nature: human beings seemed alienated from nature exactly because the rational, soulful and sense-making character that is usually associated with them is opposed to a mechanistic and deterministic domain.

The troublesome consequences of this approach to nature are multiple. First, there is the psychological and existential crisis that is well encapsulated by Novalis’s claim, “Philosophy is actually homesickness—the urge to be everywhere at home ” ( General Draft : #45), and commemorated by landmark romantic works, such as Caspar David Friedrich’s “The Wanderer above the Mist” (1818).

In the epistemological and metaphysical domains, varieties of skeptical doubts loom large behind the modern approach to nature. If modern science is right then the relation between nature and normativity is unclear. But if nature cannot provide rational norms, then how can we account for and justify our empirical claims to knowledge (human experience)? On the flipside of this epistemological worry is a metaphysical concern about the nature of the subject. For the subject, as the source of meaning, is seen as only that—a dematerialized source of meaning, devoid not only of a body, as Descartes emphasized, but, if Kant is right, of any substantiality at all (see Bernstein 2003).

Third among the consequences is the threat to any awe-inspiring stance towards the world. Not only can the divinity once attributed to nature no longer be found therein, but modern science was also seen as posing a challenge to any attempt at a secular alternative to religion. Seen as fully accessible to the calculative part of the human mind, nature becomes transparent and devoid of any mystery or human-transcending power. Are we left without a source of wonder, awe or reverence in our modern world?

According to the romantics, the way out of these worrisome consequences requires that we recognize that modern science is reductive not only in terms of its object—nature—but also in terms of its methodology: modern science employs merely what Wordsworth called the “independent intellect”. The romantics understood this as calculative reason when it is isolated from non-calculative reason, sensibility and imagination. Employed thusly, the independent intellect works as a “knife in hand” (Wordsworth, The Prelude (1805), book X, line 877).

This is crucial because, if the romantics are to retrieve the lost unity of nature itself and our lost unity with nature, they must propose a new scientific methodology, or, what comes to the same thing, a new approach to nature. The romantics aspired to reform and counterbalance the merely calculative, quantitative and mathematical use of reason that is characteristic of modern science, and open an era “When no more numbers and figures feature//As the keys to unlock every creature” (Novalis, Henry von Ofterdingen , NS 1:344). Human beings should strive to return to “the laws of things which lie/beyond the reach of human will or power;/The life of nature” (Wordsworth, “The Tables Turned”, 1798, LB) by adopting a more holistic approach that includes practical reason, sensibility, feeling, imagination, and above all the aesthetic capacity of the mind.

It should be no surprise that this holistic approach to nature—the new romantic science—is, in essence, poetic. It is romantic poetry, which, as Athenaeum Fragments (AF) #116 announces, “fuses and mixes” opposing forces: reason, feeling, imagination, physics, poetry, philosophy, medicine and alchemy—when it comes to methodology—and matter, form, freedom and nature—when it comes to the object of study, nature:

Anyone who finds in infinite nature nothing but one whole, one complete poem, in every word, every syllable of which the harmony of the whole rings out and nothing destroys it, has won the highest prize of all. (Ritter, Fragmente 2: 205)

While Kant’s discussions of nature, organisms and teleological judgment in the third Critique , and Schelling’s On the World Soul (1798) and First Outline of a System of Philosophy of Nature (1799) are the primary sources of inspiration for romantic science, the metaphysical starting point for the romantic view of nature is what Fredrick Beiser aptly dubbed “a strange wedding plan” between Fichte’s idealism and Spinoza’s realistic monism (2003: 131). [ 7 ]

Why synthetize these seemingly opposed philosophical projects—a form of idealism with realism, indeterminism with determinism, and dualism with monism? Briefly, in Fichte, the romantics found a philosopher that took the Kantian insight about the absolute value of freedom a step further, and in Spinoza, one who recognized the genuine monistic structure of the universe, where the mental (in the form of reason and subjectivity, the seats of freedom) is the flipped side of the physical (in the form of matter and objectivity). If nature itself is both physical and mental, if it has a soul or reason and a body, then, it differs from human beings only in degree, not in kind. Natural phenomena and human beings are simply different manifestations of an encompassing nature, which is therefore nothing other than Spirit: “Nature should be visible spirit, and spirit should be invisible nature” (Schelling, Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature , SW 2: 56).

Thus, the marriage between the philosophical outlooks of Fichte and Spinoza promises to consummate the valuable nucleus of modernity (the Enlightenment’s emphasis on freedom and individual rational criticism), while rebutting the modern ills of division and alienation. It promises to allow human beings to “feel at home” in a meaningful, free and natural world.

But this is only the metaphysical presupposition behind the romantic conception of nature. Their understanding of nature, not only as monistic but also as an organic whole that is self-forming and self-generating—in their terms, as a creative, living force—is inspired by what, according to them, Kant only started to point to, but failed fully to develop in the third Critique since he restricted it to a regulative and heuristic conception: namely, the conception of organic nature.

Thinking about nature as Spirit, different from the human merely in degree, already presupposes a holistic conception of nature, where the whole is prior to the parts. For, if all individuals are, in Spinoza’s words “modes” of nature, namely, merely different manifestations of the one and same whole, then these parts are necessarily dependent on the whole. But insofar as nature is also an (all encompassing) organism, then just as its parts are dependent on it (for their existence and intelligibility), so it depends on its parts for its existence as the organism that it is: independently of its parts, an organism could not sustain its particular organization, i.e., its life form. In an organism, the parts are the reciprocal cause and effect of one another and of the organism as a whole.

But an organism is also self -organizing and self -forming. While the organization of artifacts is imposed on them from outside by their producers, the particular organization and so the life form of any organism is self-produced. Consequently, to view nature as an organism is to view it dynamically—not as a dead matter, but as self-forming and self-generating. Indeed, for the romantics, nature is one living force, whose different parts—not only self-conscious philosophers, creative artists, animals, plants, and minerals, but also kinds of matter—are different stages of its organization.

From moss, in which the trace of organization is hardly visible, to the noble Form [ Gestalt ] which seems to have shed the chains of matter, the one and same drive within rules, a drive that strives to work according to one and the same ideal of purposiveness, strives to express ad infinitum one and the same archetype [ Urbild ], the pure form of our Spirit. (Schelling, “Review of the Newest in Philosophical Literature, 1796”)

Beauty in nature and art is a key for this organic and dynamic conception of nature for multiple reasons. First, the holistic and unifying character of poetry is suitable not only for the reformed scientific methodology that fuses together reason, imagination and feeling, but also for unraveling analogies and unities that are usually hidden from the bare eye, for example, the unity between kinds of matter and self-conscious human beings as different stages in the organization of the same life force.

Second, natural beauties and artworks inspire an interest in natural organization and life by their analogy with organisms, or as the romantics often put it, by being themselves organic in nature.

The transcendental poetry of the future could be called organic. When it is invented it will be seen that all true poets up to now made poetry organically without knowing it . (Novalis, Logological Fragments : I, #38).

Artworks and natural beauties are analogous to organisms in various respects.

To begin with, the analogy concerns their structure or unity. Both have holistic unities, where the parts and the whole are reciprocally interdependent. Artworks and natural beauties are so structured since (1) their beauty as a whole depends on the existence and the exact organization of their parts (for, if, say, any of the specific shapes, hues, or composition of a painting were to change, the painting as a whole may not be beautiful any longer), and (2) their parts are recognized as what they are (as beauty-making parts, or parts of a beautiful object) only in light of the whole (so that, for example, a mere shade of white may be beautiful only in light of the beauty of the painting to which it contributes as a whole, but not necessarily beautiful on its own, or when it figures in any other object). “In poetry”, then, just as in organisms, “every whole can be a part and every part really a whole” (F. Schlegel, CF: #14).

Kant claimed that the main difference between the holistic unity of organisms and the holistic unities of artworks and natural beauties is the difference between a causal or existential unity and what he called a formal unity. In organic life, the reciprocal interdependence between parts and wholes is causal and existential in the sense that it is life-sustaining. Kant thought that in aesthetics, the reciprocal interdependence is formal, rather than causal or existential, in the sense that it does not explain the existence of the objects at stake, but their beauty. While, for example, a painting might continue to exist as a painting even if some of its parts changed (say, if its composition, shapes, or hues changed), the beauty of this painting is unlikely to survive such a change. In this case, it is the beauty of the whole painting that depends on its parts, and it is the beauty of the parts, rather than their existence, that depends on the beauty of the whole: for were the painting as a whole not beautiful, its parts would not be recognized as what they are, namely, beauty-making parts.

The romantics seemed to diverge from Kant on that matter. For them, great poetry is materially and not merely formally organic:

The innate impulse of this work [ Wilhelm Meister ], so organized and organizing down to its finest detail to form a whole. No break is accidental or insignificant;…everything is at the same time both means and end. (F. Schlegel, WM: 273–74)

This means that the romantics took the work of art to be analogous to organisms in yet a stronger sense—not only in terms of its holistic unity, but also in terms of its life—its self- organization and self-judgment. Recall the sui generis character of artworks (discussed in §3.2 ): each work constitutes the norms according to which alone it could be properly judged. In romantic terms, every work has its own self-judgment. Seen as such, the artwork is not a mere artifact, but a quasi -organism in the sense that it organizes and regulates itself. And like other organic products of nature, the work too has, as it were, a life of its own, even though it is not self- organizing in the strict sense:

Just as a child is only a thing which wants to become a human being, so a poem is only a product of nature which wants to become a work of art. (F. Schlegel, CF: #21)

It is the holistic unity and life in the aesthetic domain that draws our attention to organisms and inspires us to seek the organic structure of nature as a whole.

Third, following Kant, the romantics believed that the beauty of nature reveals the purposiveness without a purpose of nature as a whole. It inspires and guides us in seeing nature as purposively organized—organized as if according to a specific purpose—even though we cannot attribute this purposive structure to any will, creator, or any end-governed activity:

That which reminds us of nature and thus stimulates a feeling for the infinite abundance of life is beautiful. Nature is organic, and therefore, the highest beauty is forever vegetative; and the same is true for morality and love. (F. Schlegel, Ideas : #86)

While this view is to be found in the third Critique , the romantics went a few steps further than Kant: first, they considered purposiveness, teleological structure and life real features of nature, rather than regulative principles for approaching nature. Second, they took these features to indicate that nature is different from self-conscious, creative human beings only in degree, but not in kind: like human beings, nature is end-governed. It is beauty, above all, that inspires this realization. As Novalis puts it, “Through beauty, nature transforms itself into a human being” ( Heinrich von Ofterdingen , NS 1), the same being that governs itself by creatively and self-consciously setting ends. The more we properly attend to beauty and art the more capable we would be of seeing nature and humanity as different aspects of a single, unified phenomenon:

Actually criticism …that doctrine which in the study of nature directs our attention to ourselves…and in the study of ourselves directs it to the outside world, to outer observations and experiments—is…the most fruitful of all indications . It allows us to sense nature, or the outside world , like a human being. (Novalis, General Draft : #42).

Aesthetics is central for the romantic “scientific revolution” for yet another reason that concerns its capacity to “enchant” nature. “Enchanting” stands here for the process of rendering nature magical, or mysterious, and thus inspiring reverence and awe (see Stone 2005). While bringing out nature’s organic structure is decisive for rebutting modern alienation, enchantment is required primarily for challenging two other consequences of modern science: the threat of a detached and unresponsive treatment of nature and what the romantics regarded as a threat of secularization. Not only did modern science portray nature as a brute domain of mechanism, and thus devoid of any awe-inspiring power, but it also rendered it completely transparent to the human mind, and thus lacking in the kind of mystery and magic that may inspire awe in a secular world. Changing our attitude towards nature and inspiring awe for it requires that we recover a sense of mystery and magic in nature, and, indeed, in everything ordinary, in everything that we have come to take for granted. This process—of recovering a sense of mystery and magic in nature and the ordinary—is so central in romanticism that it takes on the movement’s name:

Romanticizing is nothing other than a qualitative raising into higher power…. By giving a higher meaning to the ordinary, a mysterious appearance to the ordinary, the dignity of the unacquainted to that of which we are acquainted, the mere appearance of infinity to finite, I romanticize them. (Novalis, Logological Fragments : #66)

Poetry is most suitable for the business of romanticizing by virtue of two of its main features: (a) its “defamiliarizing” power, and, (b) its “ironic” ability to point to the limits of our knowledge, and thus to what must remain mysterious—beyond our cognitive capacities.

First, by virtue of its power to subtly describe even the most concrete of details and to bring to life even what, independently of it, attracts no attention, poetry has a special capacity for defamiliarization—a power that was first noticed by the romantics in their account of “romanticizing”, but dubbed “defamiliarization” only later, by 20 th century literary theorists. By its non-ordinary use of language, attention to details and evoking power, poetry brings out in vivid colors what we are usually blind to, even if it is, literally, the closest and most familiar to us. Poetry has the power to make the most familiar new, refreshing, and thus, other than familiar—different and even mysterious.

Like Novalis, Wordsworth is one of the first proponents of romanticizing in this sense. He instructs: while romantic poetry should start with the most familiar and contingent—“the incidents and situations from common life”—it should also strive to elevate them by

throw[ing] over them a certain coloring of the imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual way; and further and above all [poetry should aim] to make these incidents and situations interesting by tracing in them…the primary laws of our nature. (Preface to the Lyrical Ballads .)

Wordsworth calls on poets to write in the language of “low and rustic life”. But it is exactly the poetic use of this language that allows the “passions” of those whose language it is—ordinary people—to be “incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of Nature” (ibid.). And it is through this process of romanticizing that nature appears again as great and awe-inspiring, “The great Nature that exists in words/Of might Poets” (Wordsworth, The Prelude (1805), Book V, lines 618–19).

Second, romantic poetry is essentially ironic insofar as it brings our finitude, particularly the limits of our knowledge, to consciousness (see §2.2 ). While romantic irony is the basis for a way of life that is centered on humility, it also paves the way for awe and reverence for it suggests that there is much beyond our comprehension, much that remains mysterious, incomprehensible, greater than our capacities and possibly infinite rather than finite like us. There is much around us that merits awe.

Wordsworth’s description of nature is possibly the most powerful portrayal of the awe-inspiring character of nature as it is revealed by the poetic imagination:

A sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean, and the living air, And the blue sky, in the mind of man, A motion and a spirit, that impels, All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things. … I, so long A worshipper of Nature, hither came, Unwearied in that service: rather say With warmer love, oh! With far deeper zeal Of holier love. (Wordsworth, “Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” (1798), lines 96–103 and 154–57, in LB)

Through the romantic lens, then, nature becomes alive and a locus of Spirit. Rather than an alien force, nature speaks to us as we speak to it and to each other.

Nature is a temple where living columns Sometimes let confused words come out; Man walks through these forests of symbols Which observe him with a familiar gaze. (La Nature est un temple où de vivants piliers Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles L'homme y passe à travers des forêts de symbols Qui l'observent avec des regards familiers) pdf include--> (Baudelaire, Correspondences , 1861 [2000])

This is liberating and re-enchanting, but it also puts certain demands on us, for example, the demands to love nature as we love other human beings:

Oh, most magnificent and noble Nature! Have I not worshipped thee with such a love As never mortal man before displayed? Adored thee in thy majesty of visible creation, And searched into thy hidden and mysterious ways As Poet, as Philosopher, as Sage? (unknown date, Humphry Davy [1778–1829], Fragmentary Remains , 14)

As eccentric as the romantic call to poeticize nature and science may initially seem, it is arguably of relevance today. The organic and re-enchanted conception of nature did not only anticipate some currents in the modern ecological movement, but it also contains resources for further developments in contemporary environmental philosophy and philosophy of science.

Interestingly, scholars tend to explain romantic aesthetics not only in terms of its sources (discussed in §2.1 ), but also in terms of its legacy. While there are very interesting and well-established connections between romantic aesthetics and modernism (see Abrams 1971, Frye 1968, Cavell 1979), this section focuses on the attempt to draw a link between the former and postmodernism, a link whose ground is significantly weaker.

In recent decades, a large number of romantic scholars have argued that romanticism, in general, and the romantic primacy of aesthetics, in particular, is a precursor of the fundamental outlook of postmodernist and poststructuralist views (see, for example, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy 1988, Bowie 2003, Bowman 2014, and Gasche 1991). This reading is based on the skepticism the romantics raised about first principles and about systematicity, the romantic emphasis on human creation and language, historicism and hermeneutics, their view of the fragmented nature of modern life and on certain formulations of the primacy of aesthetics that may seem, initially, to erase any distinction between what is “real” and what is “poetic”, a product of the creative imagination. Friedrich Schlegel, for example, proclaims: “No poetry, no reality…. There is, despite all the senses, no external world without imagination” (AF: #350), and “Everything that rests on the opposition between appearance and reality…is not purely poetic” (FLP: #146).

These proclamations may seem to suggest that “there is no way out” of creative constructions, or “texts”, or that “art…does not need to point beyond itself” (Bowie 2003: 53), as if romantic aesthetics anticipates central trends in post-modernism and post-structuralism. [ 8 ] But there are reasons to worry about such a “postmodernist” reading. Some lines in romanticism—skepticism about foundationalist philosophy and system-building, the emphasis on human creation, language, and the role of historicism and hermeneutics—are indeed related to certain strands in postmodernism. But reading romantic aesthetics as proto-postmodernist is limited for a host of reasons.

First, the romantic faith in the imaginative and emotive capacities associated with the production and reception of art, and their skepticism of absolute principles and philosophical systems did not make them skeptical of reason, as many postmodernist thinkers are (see §2.1 and Beiser 2003: 3). Even romantic skepticism of absolute principles (see §3.1 ). cannot be equated with the rejection of all principles and rules. For example, though art and art appreciation cannot be reduced to any given, prior rules, they are not lawless, but the source of their own normativity (see §3.3 ).

Second, in spite of the romantic stress on the fragmentary nature of human experience (embodied in their choice of the aphoristic style, which is emphasized by their post-modernist readers), the romantics never gave up the striving after unity and wholeness. Art was not meant as a replacement for unity, but exactly as the best way to strive after and approximate unity in our modern and fragmentary condition.

For the philosopher…art is supreme, for it opens to him the holiest of holies, where that which is separated in nature and history, and which can never be united either in life and action or in thought, burns as though in a single flame in eternal and primordial unity. (Schelling, System of Transcendental Philosophy , 1800, in Heath 1978: 231)

Third, the romantics’ desire for and search after the Absolute (discussed in 3) is another reason to reject the post-modernist interpretation. For such a desire is anathema to most post-modernist thinkers, who resist and shun the possibility (and desirability) of any absolute reality.

Moreover, if one opposes the idea that there is “no way out of texts”, or that reality is “nothing other than construction”, then the post-modernist reading of the romantics appears uncharitable. Fortunately, this interpretation does not force itself on us since there are many other charitable and (historically, textually and philosophically) well-grounded readings of the proclamations just mentioned and of the romantic primacy of the aesthetics. Many of these readings were proposed in this entry under the umbrella of the formal approach to romantic aesthetics. On this formal account, rather than claiming that there is no distinction between “reality” and “fiction”, or that there is “no way out of imaginative constructions”, the romantics urged human beings to fashion their ordinary life and philosophy aesthetically for epistemological, metaphysical, ethical, political and scientific reasons.

Arguably, romantic aesthetics is not of merely historical interest. This entry has pointed to a few facets of the relevance of romantic aesthetics, thus supporting views like Berlin’s, for example, according to which the revolution brought about by romanticism is “the deepest and most lasting of all changes in the life of the West…” (1999: xiii). Its tremendous impact on generations to come all the way up to the present day is one explanation of the difficulty of precisely delimiting when the age of romanticism begins and when it ends. Indeed, rather than a post-romantic age, our age may be yet another phase in the age of romanticism:

Romanticism…is the first major phase in an imaginative revolution which has carried on until our own day, and has by no means completed itself yet. (Frye 1968: 15; see also, Larmore 1996)

German Romanticism

• Eichendorff, J. von, 1993, Joseph von Eichendorff Werke , H. Schultz (hrs.), Frankfurt a. M.: Deautscher Klassiker Verlag. [EW]
• Hardenberg, F.L. von [Novalis], 1960–88, Novalis Schriften , H.J. and G. Schulz (hrs.), Stuttgart: Verlag W. Kohlhammer. [NS]
• Hölderlin, F., 1975, Sämtliche Werke : Historisch-Kritische Ausgabe. D.E. Sattler (hrs.), Frankfurt/Basel: Verlag Roter Stern. [HSA]
• Kant, I., 1902–, Akademie Ausgabe: Kants gesammelte Schriften , hrsg. von der Königlisch Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Berlin: de Gruyter. [AK]
• Ritter, J.W., 1810, Fragmente aus dem Nachlasse eines jungen Phyiskers , Heidelberg: Schneider. [ Fragmente ]
• Schelling, F.W.J von, 1856–61, Sämtliche Werke , Schelling, K.F.A. (hrs.), Stuttgart: Cotta. [SW]
• Schlegel, F., 1958–, Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe , E. Behler, J.J. Anstett, and H. Eichner (hrs.), Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningen. [KA]

All citations from these German editions are cited by these abbreviations, and are followed by the volume, page and, when relevant, fragment numbers.

German Romanticism in English

• Behler E. and Struc R. (eds.)1968, Friedrich Schlegel: Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms , University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.
• Beiser, F. (ed. and trans.), 1996, The Early Political Writings of the German Romantics , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Bernstein, J.M. (ed.), 2003, Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Firchow, P. (ed. and trans.), 1991, Friedrich Schlegel: Philosophical Fragments , Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
• Hölderlin, F., 1797, “Das älteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus,” translated as “Oldest Programme for a System of German Idealism”, in Bernstein 2003.
• Novalis, Logological Fragments I , in Stoljar 1997.
• –––, Last Fragments , in Stoljar 1997.
• –––, General Draft , in Stoljar 1997.
• –––, Faith and Love , in Stoljar 1997.
• Novalis, 2003, Novalis: Fichte Studies , J. Kneller (ed. and trans.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [FS]
• Schulte-Sasse, J., H. Horne, and E. Mittman (eds. and trans.), 1997, Theory as Practice: A Critical Anthology of Early German Romantic Writings , Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
• Schlegel, F., “Introduction to Transcendental Philosophy”, in Schulte-Sasse et al. 1997. [ITP]
• –––, “Fragments on Literature and Poesy”, in Schulte-Sasse et al. 1997. [FLP]
• –––, “Philosophical Fragments”, in Schulte-Sasse et al. 1997. [PF]
• –––, “Concerning The Essence of Critique (1804)”, in Schulte-Sasse et al. 1997. [Critique]
• –––, “On Philosophy: To Dorothea”, in Schulte-Sasse et al. 1997. [OP]
• –––, “Philosophical Lectures: Transcendental Philosophy, Part II”, in Beiser 1996. [TPL II]
• –––, “On Goethe’s Meister ”, in Bernstein 2003. [WM]
• –––,“On Incomprehensibility”, in Bernstein 2003.
• –––, “Critical Fragments”, in Firchow 1991. [CF]
• –––, “Athenaeum fragments”, in Firchow 1991. [AF]
• –––, “Ideas”, in Firchow 1991. [ Ideas ]
• –––,“Dialogue on Poetry”, in Behler and Struc 1968. [DP]
• Schelling, F.W.J, 1978 [1800], System of Transcendental Philosophy , P. Heath (trans.), Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.
• Schleiermacher, F., “Monologue II”, in Beiser 1996.
• Schleiermacher, F., 1996 [1799], On Religion , R. Crouter (ed. and trans.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Stoljar, M.M. (ed. and trans.), 1997, Novalis: Philosophical Writings , Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
• Wood, D.W. (ed. and trans.), 2007, Notes for a Romantic Encyclopedia: Das Allgemeine Brouillon , Albany, New York: SUNY Press. [AB]

British Romanticism

• Blake, W., 1982, The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake , D.V. Erdman (ed., rev.edn.), Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. [PPWB]
• Coleridge, S.T., 1987, Lectures 1808–1819 On Literature , R.A. Foakes (ed.), NJ: Princeton University Press. [CLL]
• –––, 1983, Biographia Literaria , J. Engell and W.J. Bate (eds.). NJ: Princeton University Press. [BL]
• Coleridge, S.T. and W. Wordsworth, 2008, Lyrical Ballads: 1798 and 1800 , M. Gamer and D. Porter (eds.), Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview. [LB]
• Keats, J., 1978, The Poems of John Keats , J. Stillinger (ed.), Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. [PJK]
• –––, 1970, Letters of John Keats , R. Gittings (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press. [LJK]
• Shelley, P.B., 1964, The Letter of Percy Bysshe Shelley , Frederick L. Jones (eds.), Oxford: Clarendon Press. [LS]
• –––, 2002, Shelley’s Poetry and Prose , D.H. Reiman and N. Fraistat (eds.), New York: Norton. [SPP]
• Wordsworth, W., 1974, The Prose Works of William Wordsworth , W.J.B. Owen and J. Smyser (eds.), Oxford: Clarendon Press. [PWWW]
• –––, 1974, The Prelude: the 1805 Text , Gill, S. (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press.

French Romanticism in English

• Baudelaire, C., 2000, Selected Poems from Les Fleurs du Mal: a Bilingual Edition , N. Shapiro (trans.), Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Includes: Correspondences 1861.
• –––, 1981, Art in Paris, 1845–1862: Salons and Other Exhibitions Reviewed by Charles Baudelaire , J. Mayne (ed.), Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Includes: Salon of 1846 .
• –––, 1995, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays , J. Mayne (ed.), London: Phaidon.
• Diderot, D., 1995, Diderot on Art , J. Goodman (ed.), New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Includes: Salon of 1767 .
• Nerval, G. de, 1957, Selected Writings , G. Geoffrey Wagner (ed.), Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.

American Romanticism

• Poe, E.A., 1984, Edgar Allen Poe: Poetry and Tales , P.F. Quinn (ed.), New York: Library of America. Includes: “Sonnet: To Science” (1829).
• Abrams, M.H., 1971, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature , New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
• Ameriks, K., 2006, Kant and the Historical Turn , Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• –––, (ed.), 2000, The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Behler, E., 1993, German Romantic Literary Theory , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• –––, 1992, Frühromantik , Berlin: de Gruyter.
• Beiser, F.C., 2002, German Idealism: The Struggle Against Subjectivity 1781–1801 , Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
• –––, 2003, The Romantic Imperative , Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
• –––, 1987, The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte , Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
• –––, 1992, Enlightenment, Revolution and Romanticism , Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
• Benjamin, W., 1996, “ The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism ”, Selected Writings, vol. 1, 1913–1926 , M.W. Jennings and M. Bullock (eds.), Cambridge, Mass: The Belknap Press, 116–200.
• Berlin, I., 1999, The Roots of Romanticism , H. Hardy (ed.), Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Bernstein, J.M., 2003, “Introduction”, in Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Bowie, A., 2003, Aesthetics and Subjectivity: From Kant to Nietzsche , Manchester, England: Manchester University Press.
• Bowman, B., 2014, “On the Defense of Literary Value”, in Nassar 2014b: 147–162.
• Cavell, S. 1979, The World Viewed , Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
• –––, 1988, In Quest of the Ordinary , Chicago: Chicago University Press.
• Davy, H., 1858, Fragmentary Remains , Forgotten Books.
• Eichner, H., 1970, Friedrich Schlegel , New York: Twayne Publishers.
• Eldridge, R., 2001, The Persistence of Romanticism , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Engell, J. 1981, The Creative Imagination: Enlightenment to Romanticism , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Forster, M., 2011, German Philosophy of Language , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• –––, 2010, After Hereder: Philosophy of Language in the German Tradition , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Frank, M., 1997a, Einführung in die frühromantische Ästhetik , Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
• –––, 1997b, Unendliche Annäherung: Die Anfänge der Philosophischen Frühromantik , Frankfurt: Suhrkamp
• –––, 1997c “Wie Reaktionär war eigentlich die Frühromantik”, Athenäum , 7: 141–66.
• Frye, N., 1968, A Study of English Romanticism , Random House.
• –––, 1963, Romanticism Reconsidered , New York: Columbia University Press.
• Gasche, R., 1991, “Forward: Ideality in Fragmentation”, in Friedrich Schlegel: Philosophical Fragments , P. Firchow (ed.).
• Gjesdal, K., 2009, Gadamer and the Legacy of German Idealism , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Gorodeisky, K., 2011, “(Re)encountering Individuality: Schlegel’s Romantic Imperative as a Response to Nihilism”, Inquiry , 54 (6): 567–90.
• Gregory, A., 2005, “Philosophy and Religion”, in Oxford Guide to Romanticism , R. Nicholas (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Haym, R., 1882, Die romantische Schule , Berlin: Gaertner.
• Heine, H., 1985, The Romantic School and Other Essays , J. Hermand and R.C. Holub (eds.), New York: Continuum.
• Henrich, D., 1997, The Course of Remembrance and Other Essays on Hölderlin , E. Förster (ed.), Stanford: Stanford University Press.
• Kneller, J., 2007, Kant and the Power of the Imagination , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Kompridis, N., 2006, Philosophical Romanticism , New York: Routledge.
• Lacoue-Labarth, P. and J.L. Nancy, 1988, The Literary Absolute , P. Barnard and C. Lester (trans.), Albany, New York: SUNY Press.
• Larmore, C. 1996, The Romantic Legacy , New York: Columbia University Press.
• Lovejoy, A., 1960, Essays in the History of Ideas , New York: Capricorn.
• Millán-Zaibert, E., 2007, Friedrich Schlegel and the Emergence of Romantic Philosophy , Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
• Nassar, D., 2014a, The Romantic Absolute , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• ––– (ed.), 2014b, The Relevance of Romanticism: Essays on German Romantic Philosophy , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Pinkard, T., 2002, German Philosophy 1760–1860 , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Richards, R., 2002, The Romantic Conception of Life , Chicago: Chicago University Press.
• Rush, F., 2006, “Irony and Romantic Subjectivity”, in Kompridis 2006: 173–96.
• Saul, N. (ed.), 2009, German Romanticism , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Schmitt, C., 1986, Political Romanticism , G. Oakes (trans.), Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press.
• Schmidt, R., 2009, “From Early to Late Romanticism”, in German Romanticism , N. Sould (ed.), 21–40.
• Stone, A., 2005, “Friedrich Schlegel, Romanticism, and the Re-enchantment of Nature”, Inquiry , 48: 3–25.
• –––, 2008, “Being, Knowledge, and Nature in Novalis”, Journal of the History of Philosophy , 46: 141–64.
• –––, 2011, “The Romantic Asbolute”, British Journal of the History of Philosophy , 19: 497–517.

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Romanticism in Literature: Definition and Examples

Finding beauty in nature and the common man.

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• B.A., English, Rutgers University

Romanticism was a literary movement that began in the late 18th century and ended around the middle of the 19th century—although its influence continues to this day. Marked by a focus on the individual (and the unique perspective of a person, often guided by irrational, emotional impulses), a respect for nature and the primitive, and a celebration of the common man, Romanticism can be seen as a reaction to the huge changes in society that occurred during this period, including the revolutions that burned through countries like France and the United States, ushering in grand experiments in democracy.

Key Takeaways: Romanticism in Literature

• Romanticism is a literary movement spanning roughly 1790–1850.
• The movement was characterized by a celebration of nature and the common man, a focus on individual experience, an idealization of women, and an embrace of isolation and melancholy.
• Prominent Romantic writers include John Keats, William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Mary Shelley.

Romanticism Definition

The term Romanticism does not stem directly from the concept of love, but rather the French word romaunt (a romantic story told in verse). Romanticism focused on emotions and the inner life of the writer, and often used autobiographical material to inform the work or even provide a template for it, unlike traditional literature at the time.

Romanticism celebrated primitive and elevated "regular people" as being deserving of celebration, which was an innovation at the time. Romanticism also fixated on nature as a primordial force and encouraged the concept of isolation as necessary for spiritual and artistic development.

Characteristics of Romanticism

Romantic literature is marked by six primary characteristics: celebration of nature, focus on the individual and spirituality, celebration of isolation and melancholy, interest in the common man, idealization of women, and personification and pathetic fallacy.

Celebration of Nature

Romantic writers saw nature as a teacher and a source of infinite beauty. One of the most famous works of Romanticism is John Keats’ To Autumn (1820):

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they? Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,– While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day, And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue; Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn Among the river sallows, borne aloft Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;

Keats personifies the season and follows its progression from the initial arrival after summer, through the harvest season, and finally to autumn’s end as winter takes its place.

Focus on the Individual and Spirituality

Romantic writers turned inward, valuing the individual experience above all else. This in turn led to a heightened sense of spirituality in Romantic work, and the addition of occult and supernatural elements.

The work of Edgar Allan Poe exemplifies this aspect of the movement; for example, The Raven tells the story of a man grieving for his dead love (an idealized woman in the Romantic tradition) when a seemingly sentient Raven arrives and torments him, which can be interpreted literally or seen as a manifestation of his mental instability.

Celebration of Isolation and Melancholy

Ralph Waldo Emerson was a very influential writer in Romanticism; his books of essays explored many of the themes of the literary movement and codified them. His 1841 essay Self-Reliance is a seminal work of Romantic writing in which he exhorts the value of looking inward and determining your own path, and relying on only your own resources.

Related to the insistence on isolation, melancholy is a key feature of many works of Romanticism, usually seen as a reaction to inevitable failure—writers wished to express the pure beauty they perceived and failure to do so adequately resulted in despair like the sort expressed by Percy Bysshe Shelley in A Lament :

O world! O life! O time! On whose last steps I climb. Trembling at that where I had stood before; When will return the glory of your prime? No more—Oh, never more!

Interest in the Common Man

William Wordsworth was one of the first poets to embrace the concept of writing that could be read, enjoyed, and understood by anyone. He eschewed overly stylized language and references to classical works in favor of emotional imagery conveyed in simple, elegant language, as in his most famous poem I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud :

I wandered lonely as a Cloud That floats on high o'er vales and Hills, When all at once I saw a crowd, A host, of golden Daffodils; Beside the Lake, beneath the trees, Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Idealization of Women

In works such as Poe’s The Raven , women were always presented as idealized love interests, pure and beautiful, but usually without anything else to offer. Ironically, the most notable novels of the period were written by women (Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and Mary Shelley, for example), but had to be initially published under male pseudonyms because of these attitudes. Much Romantic literature is infused with the concept of women being perfect innocent beings to be adored, mourned, and respected—but never touched or relied upon.

Personification and Pathetic Fallacy

Romantic literature’s fixation on nature is characterized by the heavy use of both personification and pathetic fallacy. Mary Shelley used these techniques to great effect in Frankenstein :

Its fair lakes reflect a blue and gentle sky; and, when troubled by the winds, their tumult is but as the play of a lively infant, when compared to the roarings of the giant ocean.

Romanticism continues to influence literature today; Stephenie Meyers’ Twilight novels are clear descendants of the movement, incorporating most of the characteristics of classic Romanticism despite being published a century and a half after the end of the movement’s active life.

Encyclopaedia Britannica. " Romanticism ."

Cambridge University Press. " The Cambridge Companion to German Romanticism ."

Poetry Foundation. " William Wordsworth ."

University of Florida. " Romantic Myth Making: The Sympathetic Soulmate From Romanticism to Twilight and Beyond ."

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Themes of The Romantic Period

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Wordsworth-themed fridge magnets for sale at Dove Cottage, William Wordsworth’s home in the English Lake District. Photo by Martin Parr/Magnum

Sleepwalk to the gift shop

Romanticism once radically challenged conventional pieties. now it’s little more than marketable schlock. what happened.

by Fiona Sampson   + BIO

Growing up in Britain means encountering a certain kind of early 19th-century culture as a given. Address book, china mug or wall calendar, the decoration is sure to be that overloaded harvest wagon, The Hay Wain (1821), painted by John Constable. Elsewhere, riffing comedians and headline writers crank out pun after pun on the first line of William Wordsworth’s lyric poem, ‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’ (1804).

I vividly remember the teenaged sense of cultural claustrophobia that can result. These clichés were what we believed Romanticism to be, and they represented a past whose continuity we wanted to break. They belonged among the knitted teapot covers and potpourri sachets on the side tables of other generations’ lives. High school had taught us roughly when Romanticism was: from 1770, when Ludwig van Beethoven, G W F Hegel and Friedrich Hölderlin were born, to 1850, by which time Honoré de Balzac, Frédéric Chopin, Edgar Allan Poe and Mary Shelley had died. But the curriculum made zero connection between the artefacts it called ‘Romanticism’ and the realpolitik and real-life battles of Napoleonic imperialism, the Italian Risorgimento , the nation-building that culminated in 1848’s Year of Revolutions across Europe and Latin America, or the gradual abolition of slavery. Nor did we have any clue that Romanticism spoke directly to debates that raged – and still rage – around our own lives, whether about the violent resurgence of nationalism, or about identities and their associated rights.

So of course we had no sense of affinity with the radicalism and feelingful impatience of those youthful iconoclasts, the Romantic protagonists themselves. Their precocity passed us by: Felix Mendelssohn composing masterpieces as a teenager – the Octet Op 20 at age 16, A Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture Op 21 at 17 – or Mary Shelley writing her second book, Frankenstein , when she was 19. Admittedly, that great trio of second-generation poets – John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Gordon, Lord Byron, all dead by 36 – would probably have seemed old to us. (Mick Jagger may have read from Shelley’s Adonais at the start of the Rolling Stones’ 1969 Hyde Park gig: but for my generation, this too was antediluvian.)

And yet a belief – not always fully rationalised – in the value of the direct and unfettered underlay the movement, and could serve as a rallying call to a new generation. Romanticism itself eschewed conventional pieties, from marriage to the monarchy, in favour of immediate, intuitive thought; second-hand scholarship for risk-all radicalism. Freshness of thought was the ‘blithe Spirit’ with ‘unpremeditated art’, the ‘Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere; / Destroyer and preserver’ of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ‘To a Skylark’ and his ‘Ode to the West Wind’, written in June 1820 and October 1819 respectively.

How could such vibrancy have been reduced, within two centuries, to a genteel wallpaper for life in the global North?

O ne answer must be commodification, with its diminishing circle of repetition. It’s an irony that arguably the most radical movement in European thought should have been appropriated by the conservative forces of the market, but it’s also predictable. Among the market’s instincts is to monetise proven success, (literally) capitalising on already prepared appetites and cutting the costs of risk. And Romanticism has been, put simply, a global success: ‘let me count the ways,’ as that late Romantic, the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, puts it, in Sonnets from the Portuguese #43 . (Itself another of those Romantic fragments to have attained the cultural reach of cliché . )

Romanticism was the engine of the French revolution, of the more-or-less pro-democratic revolutions of 1848, and of the successive formation of nation-states that continued for another century to ripple across Europe to the borders of Russia – and across every other continent where Romantic ideas about selfhood and self-determination forced the retraction of European imperialism: as far as Africa, Asia and the Indian subcontinent. Romanticism was the starting point of experimental science. Much of today’s world – its cities and its countrysides – are shaped by the agricultural and industrial revolutions that science informed.

The German philosophers who were the movement’s patron saints, among them Hegel and Immanuel Kant, shifted the terms of Western engagement with the world and its understanding of the nature of experience. Artists and writers developed genres of expressive realism – from the Bildungsroman to confessional verse – that are still in mainstream use today, far beyond Romanticism’s European cradle. Above all, in its regicidal turn from divinely ordained jurisdiction to authority earned by the exercise of reason, Romanticism placed the human individual at the centre of its universe. That human individual – not yet either a citizen or a subject but an actor defined by their thoughts and actions – contained the seeds of that other world actor without a hinterland, the 21st-century consumer.

The poem is not Gothic picturesque, but a metonym for the failed lives of the desperately poor

This global reach is exceptional. On the other hand, it outreaches what we might call brand recognition. While the movement itself embraced radical political, cultural and intellectual transformation, brand Romanticism has been reduced to products appropriated by a culture of nostalgia, reiteration and risk-less familiarity. Tablemats reproduce landscapes by Constable and his great contemporary, J M W Turner. Biopics retell the love lives and tragic deaths of Keats and Lord Byron. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and his creature schlock their way across popular culture, from graphic novel to comic movie turn. While – and because – these have become cultural clichés, the revolutionary force of the ideas underlying them has dropped away.

For example, the affinities between Frankenstein’s naked creature, that literal sans-culotte , and the peasantry whom the French Revolution was originally intended to rescue from abjection have been forgotten, along with their author’s early formation by her parents’ pro-Revolutionary philosophies. Yet how audible it is:

I felt cold also, and half frightened, as it were, instinctively, finding myself so desolate. Before I had quitted your apartment, on a sensation of cold, I had covered myself with some clothes, but these were insufficient to secure me from the dews of night. I was a poor, helpless, miserable wretch …

A generation earlier, the ‘roofless Hut; four naked walls / That stared upon each other’ in Wordsworth’s ‘The Ruined Cottage’ (1797), the poem that eventually became Book I of The Excursion (1814), is not Gothic picturesque, but a metonym for the failed lives of the desperately poor. Constable painted underpopulated landscapes not for aesthetic reasons but because the people who had lived there until recently had been cleared away by the nation’s landowners. The infamous emigrations that resulted from the era’s Scottish Highland Clearances and that genocide by starvation, the Irish Potato Famine , were echoed in smaller scale across Britain.

S till, there’s nothing to indicate to the Sunday afternoon visitor, browsing the gift shop at the exit of some English mansion, that its reproduction telescopes, or glossy postcards of the parkland folly, are traces of violent social, political and intellectual rupture: let alone of a period of historical shame. On the contrary, they seem comfortingly to suggest a robustly established culture – the one in which Jane Austen’s ever-popular novels, for example, are set.

These comedies of manners acknowledge, and so illustrate for us today, the influence Romantic thought was having on Austen’s contemporaries. Both her first published novel Sense and Sensibility (1811) and the posthumous Northanger Abbey (1817) – whose title alone signals gleeful Gothic pastiche – mock the effects of Romantic ideas about love and emotion, or ‘sensibility’, on young women in a marriage market that traded sexual charm for financial security. But in Austen’s world Romanticism is a mere fashion, which will be long outlasted by the economic self-protection and dynastic marriages that characterise what Noël Coward could still, a century later, call ‘The Stately Homes of England’. (As the economist Thomas Piketty has pointed out, Austen introduces her male characters by their incomes, so defining – and fixed – are they.)

Of course, Coward’s song, from his show Operette (1938), is waspish camp, as when he trills:

The Stately Homes of England, How beautiful they stand, To prove the upper classes Have still the upper hand

we should not only note the sting in that last line, but hear behind it the 1827 original by the Romantic-era poet Felicia Hemans:

The stately Homes of England, How beautiful they stand! Amidst their tall ancestral trees, O’er all the pleasant land.

When Hemans published ‘The Homes of England’, in the widely read and influential Blackwood’s Magazine , she gave it an epigraph from Sir Walter Scott’s Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field (1808): ‘Where’s the coward that would not dare / To fight for such a land?’ (A grace-note: Scott’s verse-novel formed part of the Celticism that made him famous across Europe.)

Her florid language sounds of a piece with the decorative role to which the movement is relegated

The thrust of Hemans’s poem – there’s something special about ‘British values’ that is worth fighting for – is familiar in today’s post-Brexit archipelago, where an unpopular British prime minister can expect to seduce the electorate by reintroducing pre-metric measurements, the aptly named imperial system. In her essay ‘American Originality’ (2001), the US Nobel Laureate Louise Glück calls this:

the language of appeal that links Churchill to Henry V, a language that suggests the Englishman need only manifest the virtues of his tradition to prevail. These appeals were particularly powerful in times of war, the occasion on which the usually excluded lower classes were invited to participate in traditions founded on their exclusion.

Hemans’s poem had already embraced this doublethink. She brackets the idea that England is ‘free’ and ‘fair’ with its polarisation of wealth – ‘hut and hall’ is the tidy alliteration she comes up with – as if, far from a contradiction, this were the correct order of things:

The free, fair Homes of England! Long, long, in hut and hall, May hearts of native proof be rear’d To guard each hallow’d wall!

In other words, like Austen (1775-1817), Hemans (1793-1835) was more Romantic- era than Romantic. That distinction is conveniently missable today, when her florid language sounds of a piece with the decorative role to which the movement is relegated. Hemans had been born late enough to benefit from the radical ideas about education and gender roles that Mary Wollstonecraft expounded in Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792).

T his complex, metamorphosing and unstable social world was very different from the fictional givens of Austen’s social round. Wider questions about society were being pressingly posed by the French Revolution, just 20 miles away across the English Channel; and by the work of political philosophers such as Wollstonecraft’s soon-to-be husband William Godwin, whose An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice , published in the year Hemans was born, advocated direct action against traditional structures of Church and state, including the repudiation of marriage. Such changeable social relations perhaps made it easier for a woman to have a career as a published poet than hitherto. That it did not produce an answering radicalism within Hemans’s work may mean nothing more than that she was already taking a radical step in living as a writer.

But there’s something else setting the teeth on edge here: something much more like false consciousness, even denial. Hemans continues:

The Cottage Homes of England! By thousands on her plains, They are smiling o’er the silvery brooks, And round the hamlet-lanes.

Thro’ glowing orchards forth they peep, Each from its nook of leaves, And fearless there the lowly sleep As the bird beneath the eaves.

Yet, as she would have known perfectly well, early 19th-century cottages were unlikely to ‘smile’ even through the mask of a transferred epithet. The Romantic era arrived in a perfect storm of hardship for the British poor. Wealth inequalities, already enshrined in the class system, were being underscored by the onset of imperial expansion, which may have brought the wealth of the world to Britain, but did not yet bring it to the majority of the population, whom it instead impoverished relatively further still: when the rich have more money to pay for things, the price even of staples rises. Underscored too by new manufacturing and business wealth. The era’s fortune-making industrial revolution was built on discoveries by the new Romantic science, from map-making (the Ordnance Survey was established in 1791) to James Watt’s 1776 adaptation of a steam engine suitable for use in industrialisation. But the labour that fuelled the industrial revolution was supplied by mass migration of the rural poor, in a process that became the model for world industrialisation.

Real life sullied and seemed to contradict Romanticism’s ideals

Peculiarly British, though, was the application of Romantic ideas to an already-accelerating para-legal process of Enclosure by estate landlords (aka, the aristocracy), which now cleared ordinary people off the common land on which their traditional subsistence farming had relied. Its twin motors were the agricultural revolution, and the fashion for picturesque, sublime and beautiful parkland. Once the gentry began to invest in the era’s new agricultural methods and machinery – such as seed-drills and horse-drawn hoes after the designs by Jethro Tull – they became eager to protect that investment. Between 1815 and 1846 a series of tariffs on imported wheat and all grains, the infamous Corn Laws, were enacted in the British Parliament: whose Members were drawn from this class. The resulting cost and scarcity of the staple food of the poor led to widespread destitution and starvation across Britain.

Meanwhile, since the 18th century, the same class had surrounded their ‘stately’ homes with newly landscaped parks, conspicuous consumers of agricultural land that formerly supported whole villages. Despite the social injustice this involved, Romanticism aided rather than resisted the process. In 1757, Edmund Burke, that Whig politician with a politically conservative legacy, had published his influential essay in aesthetics, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful . Adopting these categories, British Romanticism might have remained content to see them act upon the newly significant, sensitive individual, were it not for a pair of Herefordshire landowners.

In the mid-1790s, Sir Uvedale Price and Richard Payne Knight joined the artist-pioneer William Gilpin in advocating the picturesque, hitherto a principle of French gardening, as a quality that could be discovered and arranged within the landscape itself. Their legacy was to be not only the rise of the ultimately democratic tourist industry, but also numerous newly enclosed parks that imposed vistas of trees and lakes on the old ruled landscapes of strip farming.

It’s as if the process of drawing the teeth of Romanticism’s radical ideas was underway from the very outset. Real life sullied and seemed to contradict Romanticism’s ideals. After being sent down from Oxford in 1811, the 18-year-old Percy Bysshe Shelley stayed in mid-Wales with an uncle who had created just such a landscape on his property:

Rocks piled on each other to tremendous heights, rivers formed into cataracts by their projections, & valleys clothed with woods, present an appearance of enchantment—but why do they enchant, why is it more affecting than a plain, it cannot be innate, is it acquired?

The very next year saw the young radical in Ireland, pamphleteering for Irish autonomy and the franchise for Roman Catholics; in 1813, with the publication of Queen Mab, his Notes advocating pacifist vegetarianism appeared. Yet his lifelong reliance on money from his Sussex estate-owning family meant complicity in the era’s agricultural reforms, and in the aristocratic privileges surrounding the baronetcy to which he was heir. Nor was his reliance on such social inequity to enable his Romantic activity unique in what was also the era of Lord Byron’s literary celebrity. A little later still, the abolitionist Barrett Browning’s own family had profited from slavery.

A nd yet. As individuals, we do our best among the contradictions of situatedness. Barrett Browning used her literary fame to become a mouthpiece not only of abolitionism in the United States, but of the Italian republican struggle. For this, Florence buried her with full civic honours.

Five years after that formative encounter with the picturesque in the mountains of the Elenydd, we find Shelley composing ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’ (1817), one of the first poems of his maturity, in which not only picturesque principles but the nature of experience itself are being worked out:

The awful shadow of some unseen Power Floats though unseen among us; visiting This various world with as inconstant wing As summer winds that creep from flower to flower; Like moonbeams that behind some piny mountain shower, It visits with inconstant glance Each human heart and countenance …

For Romanticism saw itself as not only a kind of High Table talking shop, but an actual agent of change. Witness Shelley’s fury at the older Wordsworth, fabulised in his 772-line Peter Bell the Third (1819), for selling out to the status quo:

To Peter’s view, all seemed one hue; He was no Whig, he was no Tory; No Deist and no Christian he, – He got so subtle, that to be Nothing, was all his glory.

He hired a house, bought plate, and made A genteel drive up to his door, With sifted gravel neatly laid, – As if defying all who said, Peter was ever poor.

Yet in settling their households in neighbourly community in the Lake District, Dorothy and William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey and Thomas De Quincey created the precursor of those more radically reformed ideal communities – from Portmeirion on the Welsh coast, to Uri in Switzerland – with which the Shelleys and, to an extent, the Leigh Hunts and James Hoggs, experimented – and to which 20th-century hippies and today’s off-grid communities are heir. And it was Wordsworth’s collaborative friendship with Coleridge that had from 1795 helped sew the ideas of German Idealist philosophers including Hegel and F W J Schelling into the culture that Shelley’s generation absorbed. Shelley’s reaction against the British poet laureate who was his Romantic predecessor is itself a nice fit with Hegel’s idea of history as dialectical progress.

Romanticism records not cosy continuity but the very moment when that continuity was broken

And it is Wordsworth, the elder poet, whose ecological and political awareness remains most directly legible to us today: from ‘On Seeing Miss Helen Maria Williams Weep at a Tale of Distress’ (1787), the poem he published at 16 declaring his adherence to the new principle of ‘sensibility’, to his posthumous masterpiece The Prelude (1850) – that portrait of the artist as a village. Drawing the sting of psychological insight from Wordsworth’s ‘I wandered lonely’ or denying Constable’s insight into the linked conditions of climate and labour leaves us with little more than wildflowers in the English Lake District, or a cottage by an East Anglian ford. Prettiness: that most vacuous of principles.

An irony, then, to appropriate Romanticism to represent as a national specific, let alone as some version of a ‘timeless’ rural Britain. Romanticism records not the cosy continuity for which it is so often recruited: but the very moment when that continuity was broken. But it’s not just the muddle of individual human compromise that creates the vacuum in place of radical intention. The rise of the alt-Right reminds us how politically dangerous it is to base a nation’s view of itself on some version of a past that was white, feudal, Christian. At the very least, a disarmed Romanticism resembles that anaesthetic of political conservativism that the UK’s former prime minister John Major sought to apply to the Conservative Group for Europe in 1993, when he notoriously evoked:

long shadows on county grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers, and – as George Orwell said – old maids bicycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist.

Which, given Orwell’s own political vision, is a pretty bold reappropriation. But the de-radicalisation of Romanticism hasn’t been achieved only by political process. The market, too, has something of the conservative about it. Though it trumpets the new, it thrives on settled habits of consumption. Repeating the familiar suits it just fine. It may even prefer its consumers a little bored, as they sleepwalk back to the gift shop.

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2 Romanticism and Idealism

• Published: April 2014
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This chapter will attempt to resolve a dispute between Frederick Beiser and Manfred Frank about the relationship between romanticism and idealism. In German Idealism Beiser placed the romantics within the German idealist movement, seeing them as part of the same tradition as Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. This aroused the objection of Frank, which appears in his Auswege aus dem deutschen Idealismus , and others who follow him (viz., Elizabeth Millan-Zaibert in her Friedrich Schlegel and the Emergence of Romantic Philosophy ). They claim that romanticism and idealism are opposed movements because idealist is foundationalist whereas romanticism is antifoundationalist. This chapter argues that this debate partly rests on a confusion between methodological and metaphysical issues: that the romantics had an idealist metaphysics even though they did not share the methodology of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. There are other issues causing confusion, viz., who precisely do we want to regard as a romantic, which the chapter also attempts to sort out.

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Studies in Romanticism

Adriana Craciun, Boston University

Journal Details

Peer review and submission process.

Studies in Romanticism  publishes original essays on all aspects of literature and culture of the Romantic century (1750-1850). Upon submission, articles are screened by the editor and managing editor for appropriateness for the journal. Those submissions deemed appropriate then go through a double-blind peer review process. In preparing manuscripts, contributors should consult the  Chicago Manual of Style , and specifically the “Notes and Bibliography” section appropriate for scholars in the humanities. Essays should be no more than 9,000 words in length inclusive of notes and bibliography, double-spaced in 12-point type using Times New Roman font, and should not have right justified margins. Footnotes should be at the bottom of the page and kept to a minimum. The first footnote for any source should include a full citation. Subsequent references to primary sources may by cited parenthetically in the text; other references should be cited as abbreviated footnotes. A quick version of the guidelines, with examples, appears online at  chicagomanualofstyle.org/tools_citationguide . Contributions must be in English; text quoted in other languages should include an English translation. Please save your manuscript in MS Word (.doc preferred). An abstract of no more than 300 words, headed with the title of the essay and the author’s name, institutional affiliation, and contact information, should be sent as a separate attachment. The author’s name must not be identified anywhere in the essay–neither in the text itself, nor in the footnotes, nor in headers or footers. Any self-citations should be in the third person. Use images only if they are necessary for your argument, and keep the overall number to a maximum of three. The use of Chat GPT or similar AI language-generating tools in the production of submissions constitutes academic dishonesty.

The essay should be emailed as an attachment, along with the abstract, to Jennifer Reed, the managing editor, at  [email protected] .  SiR  will not consider essays already published or under consideration elsewhere.

The Hopkins Press Journals Ethics and Malpractice Statement can be found at the ethics-and-malpractice  page.

Peer Review

Studies in Romanticism  publishes original essays on all aspects of literature and culture of the Romantic century (1750–1850).  Studies in Romanticism  will not consider essays already published or under consideration elsewhere. This includes translations of articles that have previously been published in other languages. We publish book reviews but do not publish informal articles.

Essays are submitted to the managing editor and are evaluated by the editor to determine whether or not they will be sent out for review. Submissions deemed appropriate go through a double-blind peer review process. Readers provide one of the following recommendations: (1) Acceptance, (2) Conditional Acceptance, or (3) Revise and Resubmit, and (4) Rejection. If reader evaluations conflict, the editor makes a final decision, or in some cases sends the essay out to a third reader. In cases where an author has been asked to make minor revisions, the editor alone evaluates the revised essay. If revisions are more significant, the essay may be sent back to one of the initial referees for evaluation. Once the essay has been formally accepted, it enters the publication queue. In the case of Special Issues, we typically solicit one referee for the entire issue. We aim to publish articles within one year of their acceptance.

Studies in Romanticism Special Issues Guidelines

SiR  welcomes submissions of special issue topics. Successful topics would not be conference proceedings, but they may grow out of an event or collaborative project where authors worked toward a coherent and timely topic of inquiry together and then revised their essays to this end. The special issue editor/s should send a brief, abstract-length description of the topic and names of proposed contributors for initial consideration to the managing editor. If the initial fit seems good, they will be invited to submit a 6-8 page proposal similar to one for an essay collection, with project overview and argument, intended audience and significance, competing volumes/issues, abstracts of each essay, and brief details on contributors.

Special issues should consist of four to six essays of a maximum of 9000 words each including notes and bibliography. The editorial Introduction can be 5000 words maximum, and the total number of images should not exceed 15. Issue editors are responsible for submitting to the managing editor the complete manuscript conforming to the length limits, assuring the references are all according to house style, and including all images and copyright permissions per journal requirements. Special topic issues will be subject to peer review as with all manuscripts.

We also accept proposals for shorter symposia or forums focusing on the impact of a significant current scholarly work or issue within or outside literary studies, with an invited set of responses addressing this text or issue directly (similar to PMLA’s “Theories and Methodologies”). To propose a symposium or forum, follow the same procedures as for proposing a special issue (a brief initial inquiry followed by a more substantive proposal). The symposium format would consist of shorter, more polemical contributions. Interdisciplinary and/or methodologically innovative topics are particularly encouraged.

Adriana Craciun,  Boston University

Associate Editor

Ian Newman, University of Notre Dame

Managing Editor

Jennifer Reed,  Boston University

Book Review Editor

Susan Valladares, Durham University

Advisory Board

Alan Bewell,  University of Toronto      David Bromwich,  Yale University      Luisa Calè,  Birkbeck, University of London      Julie Carlson,  University of California, Santa Barbara      Manu Samriti Chander,  Rutgers University-Newark      James Chandler,  University of Chicago      Linda Colley,  Princeton University      Jeffrey N. Cox,  University of Colorado, Boulder      James Davies,  University of California, Berkeley      Mary Favret,  Johns Hopkins University      Michael Gamer,  University of Pennsylvania      Kevin Gilmartin,  California Institute of Technology      Ian Haywood,  University of Roehampton, London      Noah Heringman,  University of Missouri      Theresa Kelley,  University of Wisconsin-Madison      Jon Klancher,  Carnegie Mellon University      Greg Kucich,  University of Notre Dame      Nigel Leask,  University of Glasgow      Michelle Levy,  Simon Fraser University      Peter J. Manning,  Stony Brook University      Patricia A. Matthew,  Montclair State University      Joseph Rezek,  Boston University     Charles J. Rzepka,  Boston University      Stacey Sloboda,  University of Massachusetts, Boston

Emeritus Editors

Kenneth R. Johnston,  Indiana University, Bloomington      Jerome J. McGann,  University of Virginia      Morton D. Paley,  University of California, Berkeley     Charles J. Rzepka, Boston University      David Wagenknecht,  Boston University

The  Book Reviews  section provides concise, substantive assessments (approx. 1200-1500 words) of recently published scholarly titles in the field. While attending to all major works of scholarship, including new scholarly editions and essay collections,  SiR  takes an especial interest in reviewing first monographs and work by younger scholars.

Send all book review correspondence to:   Susan Valladares, Durham University   [email protected]

Presses should send any review copies to:   Dr Susan Valladares Department of English Studies Durham University  Elvet Riverside  Durham  DH1 3JT UNITED KINGDOM  

Please send book review copies to the contact above. Review copies received by the Johns Hopkins University Press office will be discarded.

Abstracting & Indexing Databases

• Arts & Humanities Citation Index
• Current Contents
• Web of Science
• Dietrich's Index Philosophicus
• IBZ - Internationale Bibliographie der Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaftlichen Zeitschriftenliteratur
• Internationale Bibliographie der Rezensionen Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaftlicher Literatur
• Academic Search Alumni Edition, 1/1/1995-
• Academic Search Complete, 1/1/1995-
• Academic Search Elite, 1/1/1995-
• Academic Search Premier, 1/1/1995-
• Art & Architecture Complete, 1/1/1995-
• Art & Architecture Index, 1/1/1995-
• Art & Architecture Source, 9/1/1983-
• Art Abstracts (H.W. Wilson), 1/15/1983-
• Art Index (H.W. Wilson), 9/1/1983-
• Biography Index: Past and Present (H.W. Wilson), vol.24, 1985-vol.48, no.2, 2009
• Book Review Digest Plus (H.W. Wilson), Dec.1983-
• Current Abstracts, 1/1/2000-
• Historical Abstracts (Online), 3/1/1962-
• Humanities & Social Sciences Index Retrospective: 1907-1984 (H.W. Wilson), 10/15/1964-7/15/1983
• Humanities Abstracts (H.W. Wilson), 9/1/1983-
• Humanities Index (Online), 1983/12-
• Humanities Index Retrospective: 1907-1984 (H.W. Wilson), 10/15/1964-7/15/1983
• Humanities International Complete, 1/1/1995-
• Humanities International Index, 1/1/1995-
• Humanities Source, 10/15/1964-
• Humanities Source Ultimate, 10/15/1964-
• International Bibliography of Theatre & Dance with Full Text, 6/1/1996-
• Literary Reference Center Plus, 9/1/1992-
• MLA International Bibliography (Modern Language Association)
• OmniFile Full Text Mega (H.W. Wilson), 9/1/1983-
• OmniFile Full Text Select (H.W. Wilson), 9/1/1983-
• Poetry & Short Story Reference Center, 9/1/1992-
• RILM Abstracts of Music Literature (Repertoire International de Litterature Musicale)
• Russian Academy of Sciences Bibliographies
• Social Sciences Index Retrospective: 1907-1983 (H.W. Wilson), 1964/09-1973/12
• TOC Premier (Table of Contents), 1/1/1995-
• Scopus, 2002-, 1977, 1964
• Book Review Index Plus
• Gale Academic OneFile, 03/1989-
• Gale Academic OneFile Select, 03/1989-
• Gale General OneFile, 03/1989-
• Gale in Context: College
• Gale in Context: Elementary
• Gale OneFile: High School Edition, 03/1989-
• Gale World Scholar: Latin America and the Caribbean, 3/1989-
• General Reference Center Gold, 03/1989-
• General Reference Centre International, 3/1989-
• InfoTrac Custom, 3/1989-
• Student Resources in Context, 03/1989-
• Gale In Context: Canada, 03/1989-
• Gale in Context: High School
• ArticleFirst, vol.29, no.1, 1990-vol.49, no.4, 2010
• Periodical Abstracts, v.28, n.2, 1989-v.49, n.4, 2010
• Personal Alert (E-mail)
• Literary Journals Index Full Text
• Periodicals Index Online
• Professional ProQuest Central, 07/01/1989-
• ProQuest 5000, 07/01/1989-
• ProQuest Central, 07/01/1989-
• Research Library, 07/01/1989-
• The Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (ABELL)

Abstracting & Indexing Sources

• Abstracts of English Studies   (Ceased)  (Print)
• Index to Book Reviews in the Humanities   (Ceased)  (Print)
• MLA Abstracts of Articles in Scholarly Journals   (Ceased)  (Print)
• The Music Index (Print)   (Ceased)  (Print)

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