Romanticism

Social & Political Structure

• Individualism
• Industrialization
• Revolution: liberty, equality, fraternity
• Individualism, uniqueness, nationalism
• Manufacture, trade, break from social norms/decorum
• Rise of the middle class, education
• Fear & hope

Imagination & Adventure

• Joy of existence, experience
• Intense awareness
• Melancholic nostalgia
• Beauty in the messiness
• Rejection of neoclassical order
• Focus on self, nature, "organic form"
• Common people, language
• Influenced by medieval romance

Romantic View of the Poets of the Bible

• Did not adhere to classical rules
• Spontaneous, heartfelt, sublime, organic form
• Creation vs. imitation; Creativity and connection with the Divine
• Poets as prophets "speaking boldly against social evils"
• Bible regained some influence
• Respect for the past & ages of faith

Escape to Nature

• Imagery: flowers, clouds, ocean
• Peace & beauty
• Simplier times
• Innocence of youth, children should be free
• Rejection of society & progress
• Freedom in the woods and mountains

Romanticism

• Focus on self
• Nature's grandeur
• Passions & experiences
• God is both "transcendent and immanent," always near
• God is manifest in the world/nature/self

The Modern World

• Sacredness of the individual
• Suspicion of social institutions
• Expressing feeling = authenticity
• Nostalgia for simpler times
• Faith in genius
• Values originality & imagination
• Ambivalent relation to science

Edmund Burke

• Philosophical Enquiry: "The Sublime"
• Nature most sublime subject
• Experience moves beyond thought and reason
• Awe-inspiring, transcendent experience

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

• Privileged upbringing
• Expelled from Oxford for being unconventional
• A Defense of Poetry
• Poetry's connection with the future
• Writes about dejection, nature, mental anguish
• Good from evil

A Defense of Poetry

• Poetry is for inspiration rather than education
• Even poetry about dark subjects is meant to be pleasurable
• Value of imagination
• Virtue, love, patriotism, friendship
• "Poetry redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity of man."
• Reveals human experience, inspiration, influence

William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

• Impressions of his youth, mother & father's death, separation from sister
• Simple language/themes, valued experience/nature
• Personal experience & external world
• Value of memories
• Grief & depression, loss of innocence

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778)

• On Education: Celebrated the natural state of children
• Uniqueness of the individual
• "I am made unlike anyone I have ever met; I will even venture to say that I am like no one in the whole world." -Confessions

Rousseau cont.

• Product of the Enlightenment, diverted from tabula rasa
• Romanticists: Uncivilized, primitive state of man was desirable rather than an "Enlightened" state of the age of reason
• Logic

Proverbs 28:26 "Those who trust in themselves are fools, but those who walk in wisdom are kept safe."

1 Corinthians 1:20-25 "Where is the wise person? Where is the teacher of the law? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe."

Christian Worldview

• Nature: Ordered machine vs. primitive perfect state = ignores fall of man
• Truth: Objective & rational vs. Inner inspiration and transcendent experience, mysticism
• Man: Rational machine that can solve problems vs. Perfect in primitive state, strive toward wonder and unknowable
• God: Deism/Atheism vs. Subjective, atheistic, syncretic (blend of religions)

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