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British Poetry

Notes The modern sense of a romantic character may be expressed in Byronic ideals of a gifted, perhaps
misunderstood loner, creatively following the dictates of his inspiration rather than the standard
ways of contemporary society.
Although the movement was rooted in the German Sturm und Drang movement, which prized
intuition and emotion over Enlightenment rationalism, the ideologies and events of the French
Revolution laid the background from which both Romanticism and the Counter-Enlightenment
emerged. The confines of the Industrial Revolution also had their influence on Romanticism, which
was in part an escape from modern realities; indeed, in the second half of the 19th century, “Realism”
was offered as a polarized opposite to Romanticism. Romanticism elevated the achievements of
what it perceived as heroic individualists and artists, whose pioneering examples would elevate
society. It also legitimized the individual imagination as a critical authority, which permitted freedom
from classical notions of form in art. There was a strong recourse to historical and natural inevitability,
a zeitgeist, in the representation of its ideas.

2.2.1 Characteristics
In a basic sense, the term “Romanticism” has been used to refer to certain artists, poets, writers,
musicians, as well as political, philosophical and social thinkers of the late 18th and early to mid
19th centuries. It has equally been used to refer to various artistic, intellectual, and social trends of
that era. Despite this general usage of the term, a precise characterization and specific definition of
Romanticism have been the subject of debate in the fields of intellectual history and literary history
throughout the 20th century, without any great measure of consensus emerging.
Arthur Lovejoy attempted to demonstrate the difficulty of defining Romanticism in his seminal
article “On The Discrimination of Romanticisms” in his Essays in the History of Ideas (1948); some
scholars see romanticism as essentially continuous with the present, some like Robert Hughes see
in it the inaugural moment of modernity, some like Chateaubriand, ‘Novalis’ and Samuel Taylor
Coleridge see it as the beginning of a tradition of resistance to Enlightenment rationalism—a
‘Counter-Enlightenment’—to be associated most closely with German Romanticism. Still others
place it firmly in the direct aftermath of the French Revolution. An earlier definition comes from
Charles Baudelaire: “Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject nor exact truth,
but in the way of feeling.”

2.2.2 Counter-Enlightenment

Many intellectual historians have seen Romanticism as a key movement in the Counter-
Enlightenment, a reaction against the Age of Enlightenment. Whereas the thinkers of the
Enlightenment emphasized the primacy of reason, Romanticism emphasized intuition, imagination,
and feeling, to a point that has led to some Romantic thinkers being accused of irrationalism.

Romanticism focuses on Nature: a place free from society’s judgment and restrictions.
Romanticism blossomed after the age of Rationalism, a time that focused on scientific
reasoning.

2.2.3 Genius, Originality and Authorship

The Romantic movement developed the idea of the absolute originality and artistic inspiration by
the individual genius, which performs a “creation from nothingness;” this is the so-called Romantic
ideology of literary authorship, which created the notion of plagiarism and the guilt of a
derivativeness. This idea is often called “romantic originality.” The romantic poets’ turned their
beliefs on originality into “the institution of originality.” The English poet John Milton, who lived
in the 17th century, was part of the origin of the concept.

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