The Romantic period was shaped by the social and political events of the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century. The French and American revolutions announced a radical break in historical continuity that was accompanied by the birth of democratic and egalitarian ideas (Damrosh et al. 7). The literature of that time reflected the revolutionary spirits and produced multiple innovations in content and form (Damrish et al. 8). While some writers addressed political issues, others created subjective lyrics and novels, depicting the psychological dramas of mind and feelings.
Imagination was one of the main subjects and driving forces of Romanticism. The movement proclaimed the independence of the mind from physical reality and the artist’s ability to transform it to achieve their creative goals. According to Damrosh et al., “the rapid changes, new demands, and confusions of the age often pressed writers into imagining worlds elsewhere,” and this impulse gave the name to the period — the “Romantic” era (10). Its main voices were poets William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelly, John Keats, William Blake, and Lord Byron, who “assumed a bardic stance to credit their dreams, hopes, and visions” (Damrosh et al. 11). Proclaiming emotional refinement over rational intellect, they rejected the existing literary traditions to put the individual experience in the foreground in their literary works.
The philosophical publications of that time focused on the nature of aesthetics. Edmund Burke in his treatise Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, written in 1757, explored the nature of beauty. According to Burke, the beautiful is what is well-formed and aesthetically pleasing, and the sublime is what can compel and destroy it (37). Both the beautiful and the sublime can be explained by their causal structures, with the passion of love being the cause of the beauty, and the passion of fear being the cause of the sublime (Burke 48). Burke’s work was the first that defined and separated these aesthetical categories, and it attracted the attention of other prominent philosophers, such as Immanuel Kant.
In the book The Critique of Judgment, Kant discussed the aesthetic values of the agreeable, the beautiful, the sublime, and the good. In the introduction, he criticized Burke for not understanding the causes of the beautiful and the sublime (Kant 21). Kant claimed that the agreeable is a purely sensory judgment, the good is an ethical judgment, and the beautiful and the sublime are subjective and not tied to any definite concept (Kant 45). People define something as beautiful if its form fits their cognitive powers, and defining something as sublime means that it lies beyond the limits of comprehension and is an object of fear (Kant 48). Overall, Burke and Kant’s explorations of aesthetic concepts laid the foundation for many later philosophical explorations and reflected the spirit of Romanticism.
Overall, in philosophy, Romanticism was characterized by the break from the classic Western traditions of rationality towards the exploration of beauty, inner motives, spiritual freedom, and individual creativity. In literature, it proclaimed emotionalism, irrationality, imagination, fantasy, and the ideas of freedom. Shaped by the political struggles of the 18th century and the Industrial Revolution, the Romantic movement aimed to create art that would reflect the artist’s emotions and deepest beliefs. It has a profound effect on politics, music, education, social and natural sciences.
References
Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. J. Dodsley, 1767.
Damrosh, David, et al., editors. British Literature: The Romantics and Their Contemporaries. 5th ed., Pearson, 2011.
Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgement. Barnes & Noble Publishing, 2005.