Romanticism Essays (1184 words) - Romanticism, Literary Genres

Romanticism Romanticism literature in poetry and how it effects everyday society. I have no quarrel, it is scarcely necessary to add, either with the man of science or the romanticist when they keep in their proper place. (Gleckner 33). Some people are still unclear of the exact boundaries in which literature is considered Romanticism, but few common relations seem to be apparent in all or most pieces.The Romantic believes that the particular qualities which make-up humanness - mind, purpose, consciousness, will, personality are unique in known phylogeny, and are so far at variance with the physical conditions in which man exists that they are irrelevant to the general structure of physical reality.(Gleckner 123). As the drunken era of over-doped writers started their 1770's few thought with such creativeness as Irving's Rip Van Winkle. People became obsessed by the idea of freedom, and the writers became rebels, perpetually in revolt against conservative society, yearning after a spiritual inde pendence that the current age denied them. Hero of American Romanticism: male, young, innocence, love of nature, distrust to town life.(Arpin 120). Romanticism logic might have been considered a waste of laboring effort to conceive but, it made a revolutionary path for new way of thinking for an old school society. The Romantic attitude to life and art has a subjective foundation is not to be denied.( Gleckner 260). Romantic poetry and thought have their starting-point in the poet himself, in his aspirations and in his experience. On the one hand, his aspiration to a certain fullness of being, to a certain purity of spiritual life, to harmony and unity, a yearning toward the absolute. On the other hand, a visionary experience which responds to this aspiration and which assures the soul of the validity of its dream and of its hope. To understand the romantic doctrine, it is therefore necessary to scrutinize the experiences which the romantics thought crucial and from which all their intellectual activity arose. In these germinal experiences, there are many individual differences which cannot delay as here. The readers only know t he word as the poet decided to show it to them. The interpretation in which one can receive from the piece is left for society to experience. Thus, as romantic literature everywhere developed, imagination was praised over reason, emotions over logic, and intuition over science-making way for a vast body of literature of great sensibility and passion.(Funk 1). Proper object of the romantic poetic experience is in fact, a sort of matter-spirit continuum. For the English romantic poets, nature is not the treasure-house of all that is primitive, chaotic, savage, or sensational. It is the archetype and the accomplished model of all creation. Their metaphysics may be thought rather unstable: they are not English for nothing. But they have brought into being what might be called a philosophy of creativity, which is the core of their thought, in the same way as the experience in which this philosophy originates in its vital core. The Romantics found in nature a far less clearly defined divi nity; their experiences is usually recorded as a more generalized emotional and intellectual awakening.(Arpin 119). Such an approach allows us to see the romantic doctrine of nature and art in its proper perspective. Nature, as revealed by the poetic experience, is a tertium quid born of the meeting and interpretation of two opposite forces: the unity and organizing power of the spirit, and diversity and chaos of matter. The idealizing and certifying function of art is, no doubt, something of a commonplace. (Gleckner 166). But for the romantics a poem's unity and ideal quality do not arise out of strictly intellectual or technical operation; they are arrived at, as in neoclassicism, by taking general types according to fixed rules. They are, on the contrary, the culmination of an organic process in which the poets create a work which is a symbol. As a critic, Poe defended the doctrine of art for art's sake; and his poems their best have a curious rhythmic fascination.(Quennell 178). The Romantic Movement began to take shape in England many years before it emerged any where else where it would reach its highest point during the productive 1830's. Romantic feelings had always existed; but only