What is Romanticism? How did it find its way into the English literary scenario ?/ Analyse the socio-political background of the Romantic revival./ Identify any four of the major trends of thought in the Romantic period, and discuss their application in the works of contemporary poets.

What is Romanticism? How did it find its way into the English literary scenario ?/ Analyse the socio-political background of the Romantic revival./ Identify any four of the major trends of thought in the Romantic period, and discuss their application in the works of contemporary poets.

ROMANTICISM

The romantic period emphasised the self, creativity, imagination and the value of art. This is in contrast to the Enlightenment emphasis on Rationalism and Empiricism.

It roots can be found in the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant. Philosophers and writers associated with the Romantic movement include Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), Freidrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1775-1854), and George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) in Germany; Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) and William Wordsworth (1770-1850) in Britain.

Philosophically romanticism represents a shift from the objective to the subjective: Science claims to describe the objective world, the world understood from no particular viewpoint. Imagine three people looking at a landscape, one is a farmer, another a property developer and the third an artist. The farmer would see the potential for raising crops and livestock, the property developer the chance to build houses and the artist at the shades and subtleties of colour and form. None of these individuals is seeing the landscape objectively; they are seeing it from a particular or subjective viewpoint.

The move from the objective to the subjective is a result of Kant's idea that human beings do not see the world directly, but through a number of categories. We do not directly see "things-in-themselves"; we only understand the world through our human point of view. If we agree with Kant that we can never know things-in-themselves, we may as well discard them. This leads to Idealism; the belief that what we call the "external world" is somehow created by our minds......................

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