Romanticism has very little to do
with things popularly thought of as "romantic," although love may
occasionally be the subject of Romantic art. Rather, it is an
international artistic and philosophical movement that redefined
the fundamental ways in which people in Western cultures thought
about themselves and about their world
It is one of the curiosities of
literary history that the strongholds of the Romantic Movement were
England and Germany, not the countries of the romance languages
themselves. Thus it is from the historians of English and German
literature that we inherit the convenient set of terminal dates for
the Romantic period, beginning in 1798, the year of the first
edition of Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge and of
the
composition of Hymns to the Night by Novalis, and ending in
1832,
the year which marked the deaths of both Sir Walter Scott and
Goethe. However, as an international movement affecting all the
arts, Romanticism begins at least in the 1770's and continues into
the second half of the nineteenth century, later for American
literature than for European, and later in some of the arts, like
music and painting, than in literature. This extended chronological
spectrum (1770-1870) also permits recognition as Romantic the
poetry of Robert Burns and William Blake in England, the early
writings of Goethe and Schiller in Germany, and the great period of
influence for Rousseau's writings throughout Europe.
The early Romantic period thus
coincides with what is often called the "age of
revolutions"--including, of course, the American (1776) and the
French (1789) revolutions--an age of upheavals in political,
economic, and social traditions, the age which witnessed the
initial transformations of the Industrial Revolution. A
revolutionary energy was also at the core of Romanticism, which
quite consciously set out to transform not only the theory and
practice of poetry (and all art), but the very way we perceive the
world. Some of its major precepts have survived into the twentieth
century and still affect our contemporary period.