In 1774, a young German author named Johann Wolfgang von Goethe published a novel called The Sorrows of Young Werther. This book sent men across Europe into fits of despair and suicide, mimicking its protagonist who was an artist with a sensitive and passionate temperament. The story arrived just as the Enlightenment's belief in pure rationality began to crack under pressure from a movement known as Sturm und Drang, or Storm and Stress. That earlier German movement had already argued that intuition and emotion were key components of insight, directly challenging the idea that humans could fully comprehend the world through reason alone.
The French Revolution beginning in 1789 provided another massive shockwave for these early thinkers. Many Romantics throughout Europe sympathized with the ideals and achievements of the revolutionaries, seeing them as liberators against old social conventions. Yet this sympathy often wavered when the revolution gave way to the dictatorship of Napoleon Bonaparte, which many found shocking. A confluence of circumstances including the rise of Realism and Charles Darwin's publishing of the Origin of Species later contributed to Romanticism's decline in the mid-nineteenth century. By World War I, the cultural climate had changed so drastically that Romanticism essentially dispersed into subsequent movements.
Core Aesthetic Principles
German painter Caspar David Friedrich declared that the artist's feeling is his law. He believed that emotions should dictate formal approach, rejecting the strictures of classical form in favor of authentic self-expression. This philosophy stood in stark contrast to the Enlightenment's scientific rationalization of Nature. Romantics generally believed a close connection with Nature was beneficial for human beings, especially for individuals who broke off from society to encounter the natural world by themselves.
William Wordsworth wrote that poetry should begin with the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, which the poet then recollects in tranquility. This method enabled poets to find suitably unique forms for representing such feelings. The movement placed the highest importance on the freedom of artists to authentically express their sentiments and ideas. They argued that passion and intuition were crucial to understanding the world, and that beauty is more than merely an affair of form but rather something that evokes a strong emotional response.
Romanticists elevated several key themes to which they were deeply committed: a reverence for nature and the supernatural, an idealization of the past as a nobler era, a fascination with the exotic and the mysterious, and a celebration of the heroic and the sublime. They lionized the achievements of heroic individuals, especially artists who began to be represented as cultural leaders. Percy Bysshe Shelley described poets as the unacknowledged legislators of the world.