Romanticism: An Overview

Romanticism is a literary and philosophical theory which sees the individual at the center of all life and all experience. It is an exploration and a championing of human potentialities.

While the eighteenth-century considered the poet as a maker of objects readily understood by the general educated reading public, the Romantics saw the poet as a prophet, visionary, or seer valued for his unique feelings and particular attitudes. As such, the imagination was felt to show a nobler truth than that available to the reason. Nature, and the simple things of everyday life, were considered the proper materials for art, for in nature was the revelation of the truth.

One of the best studies of Romanticism is M. H. Abrams' Natural Supernatualism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (Norton: 1971). Using ideas set forth in Shelley's A Defence of Poetry as a starting point, Abrams notes that

the major Romantic poets shared "important themes, modes of expression, and ways of feeling and imagining;"
their writing was "part of a comprehensive intellectual tendency which manifested itself in philosophy as well as poetry;" and,
this tendency was, in part, the result of the "drastic political and social changes of the age." (11)

Lesson You will find these ideas explained more fully in the introduction to "The Romantic Period" (1-23). Read these pages carefully before moving on to the first lesson.