The greatest single shift in the Western consciousness
In short: In the late 18th century, a profound intellectual revolution began to dismantle the era of reason. Moving away from order and logic, a new movement emerged to celebrate the irrational, the individual, and the untamed power of human emotion.
Historian Isaiah Berlin famously characterized Romanticism as the most significant transformation in Western consciousness. Emerging between the late 18th and mid-19 and 19th centuries, this movement functioned as a deliberate rejection of the preceding Enlightenment. Where the era of Neoclassicism prized harmony, balance, and rationalism, Romanticism sought the opposite: the subjective, the spontaneous, and the visionary. This era of upheaval also reacted against the physical materialism and rationalism that defined 18th-century thought.
The movement's core was a fascination with the inner self and the heights of human potential. It elevated emotion over intellect and the senses over reason, focusing intensely on the struggles of the individual hero and the genius. This was not merely a literary trend but an all-encompassing attitude that reshaped architecture, music, painting, and even historiography. It found beauty in the mysterious, the occult, and the exotic, often looking backward to the medieval era and folk traditions for inspiration. This preoccupation with the supernatural and the subconscious was particularly evident during the movement's initial phase in Germany. Artists and thinkers also became obsessed with the monstrous, the diseased, and even the satanic.
In England, the movement found its manifesto in the 1790s. The publication of the Lyrical Ballads by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge marked a pivotal moment. Wordsworth’s 1800 preface to the second edition famously defined poetry as the 'spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.' Alongside figures like William Blake, these poets helped establish a style that prioritized imaginative truth over strict formal rules, forever changing the landscape of Western art. The movement's roots can be traced back to Pre-Romantic trends from the mid-18th century, including a renewed interest in medieval romances. This included the works of Sir Walter Scott, a prominent novelist and historian.
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Sources
- Summary by Intellect · source: The Origins of Romanticism
- Also: www.britannica.com — Romanticism | Definition, Art, Era, Traits, Literature, Paintings, Artists, & Facts | Britannica
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