Romanticism in literature

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© 2022 IJCRT | Volume 10, Issue 5 May 2022 | ISSN: 2320-2882
 
IJCRT2205067 
International Journal of Creative Research Thoughts (IJCRT) 
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rationalism and physical materialism in general. Romanticism emphasized the individual, the 
subjective, the irrational, the imaginative, the personal, the spontaneous, the emotional, the 
visionary, and the transcendental. 
2. 
ROMANTICISM DEFINITION
: 
The term Romanticism has not been directly shared from the concept of love but rather 
derived from the French word ‘romaunt’ (a romantic story told in verse). Romanticism that 
is focused on emotions and the inner feelings of the writer, and is often used as an 
autobiographical asset to inform about the work or even to provide a template for it, which is 
not like the traditional literature at the time. 
Romanticism is celebrated as the primitive and elevated "regular people" as deserving of 
celebration, which was an innovation at the time. Romanticism is also fixated on nature as a 
primordial force and encouraged the concept of loneliness as necessary for spiritual and 
artistic development.
Among the characteristic attitudes of Romanticism were the following: 
a deepened appreciation of the beauties of nature; a general exaltation of emotion over 
reason and of the senses over intellect; a turning in upon the self and a heightened 
examination of human personality and its moods and mental potentialities; a preoccupation 
with the genius, the hero, and the exceptional figure in general and a focus on his or her 
passions and inner struggles; a new view of the artist as a supremely individual creator, 
whose creative spirit is more important than strict adherence to formal rules and traditional 
procedures; an emphasis upon imagination as a gateway to transcendent experience and 
spiritual truth; an obsessive interest in folk culture, national and ethnic cultural origins, and 
the medieval era; and a predilection for the exotic, the remote, the mysterious, the weird, the 
occult, the monstrous, the diseased, and even the satanic. 
Several developments were being followed by the Romanticism proper from the mid-18th 
century and that can be defined as Pre-Romanticism. Among such trends, Medieval 
Romance had its arrival, from which the Romantic Movement has derived its name. The 
romance, as a whole, was a tale or ballad of chivalric adventure. It was focused on the non-
native and the individual heroism; and the mysterious was in clear contrast to the elegant 
formality and artificiality of prevailing Classical forms of literature, such as the French 
Neoclassical tragedy or the English heroic couplet in poetry. This new interest is relatively 
callow but overtly emotional literary expressions of the past were to be a dominant note in 
Romanticism. 
The publication of the Lyrical Ballads by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor 
Coleridge helped Romanticism to step into English Literature in the 1790s. Wordsworth’s 
“Preface” to the second edition (1800) of the Lyrical Ballads in which he described poetry as 
“the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” became the manifesto of the English 
Romantic movement in poetry. William Blake was the third important poet of this Romantic 
Movement’s early phase in England. The first phase of the Romantic Movement in Germany 
was completely focused on the innovations in both literary style and content; and by a 
preoccupation with the supernatural, the mystical, and the subconscious. A flock of talents, 
including Friedrich Hölderlin, Novalis, the early Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, August 
Wilhelm Jean Paul, Ludwig Tieck, and Friedrich von Schlegel, Wilhelm Heinrich 
Wackenroder, and Friedrich Schelling belong to this first phase. In Revolutionary France, 
François- Auguste-René, Vicomte de Chateaubriand, and Madame de Staël were some of the 
chief initiators of Romanticism by virtue of their influential historical and theoretical 
writings. 

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