Romanticism

RomanticismDr. Gerald R. Lucas

Revolt of the Spirit

The Age of Revolutions

The Age of Imagination

The Power of Nature

Rediscovered Symbolism & Myth

The Man of Feeling (The Hero-Artist)

Eugène Delacroix“Liberty Leading the People” (1830)

The Age of Revolt

American Revolution (1776)

French Revolution (1789)

Upheavals in political, economic, and social traditions

Reform how we see the world in the arts

Rejects (generally) absolute systems

Eugène Delacroix“The Death of Sardanapalus” (1828)

ImaginationElevated to a primary position

Displaced the supremacy of reason

Is the primary facility for creating art

Links humans with nature and divinity

Creates the world around us

Allows us to reconcile differences and opposites

Emphasizes intuition, instincts, and feelings

Peder Balke“Nordkap” (18340)

NatureIs a work of art

Is constructed by a divine imagination

Is a healing power

Is a source of subject and image

Is a refuge from the artificial constructs of civilization

Is an organically unified whole

Is the opposite of the scientific mechanical

Allows for meditation and contemplation

Symbolism & Myth

Simultaneously suggest many things

Express the inexpressible

Links the present to the past

Aligned with the Middle Ages and the Baroque

Looked to the exotic

Re-envisioned the everyday

William WordsworthPreface to Lyrical Ballads

“The real language of men in a state of vivid sensation”

“All good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”

“Emotion recollected in tranquility” & “a complex feeling of delight”

Poetry

Became free of Neoclassicism’s mechanical rules

Became bold, rather than restrained

Became suggestive, rather than precisely clear

Became experimental, rather than consigned to rules of composition and genre

Emphasized the feelings of the individual artist as creator (1st-person lyric)

Individual Expression

Illuminated what was within the individual, not the external world

Direct thoughts of the poet

Development of the poet's mind

the artist becomes hero

The IndividualIs emphasized — the unique, the eccentric

Opposed the typology of Neoclassicism

Becomes the “hero-artist”

Heaven-stormers & Outcasts

Must create his/her own way to live