Romanticism By: Megan, Wes and Lexsi Romanticism

● Romanticism is the movement in the arts and literature that originated in the late 18th century, emphasizing inspiration, subjectivity, and the primacy of the individual. ● Romanticism is a reaction against enlightenment, but it also depends on it because without enlightenment, people wouldn’t have imaginative ideas. ● You can think of romanticism as an “umbrella term” under which many stylistic themes and values meet and interact such as, the gothic, the sublime, the sentimental, love of nature, and the romance narrative. Topics

● Feelings, emotions, imagination ● Belief in children’s innocence and wisdom; youth as a golden age ● Nature as beauty and truth ● Heroic individualism ● Outsiders ● Nostalgia for the past ● Desire or will as personal motivation ● Intensification, excess and extremes ● Common people idealized as dependable sources of true common sense and sentiment ● Idealized or abstract settings: characters as symbolic types ● The gothic as nightmare world of intense emotions and intense psychology Poets ● William Wordsworth ● John Keats ● Samuel Taylor Coleridge ● Lord Byron ● William Blake ● Robert Burns ● Edgar Allan Poe ● Victor Hugo ● Walt Whitman Poetry Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman is the most important poet of the American romantic movement. He’s credited with developing a style of poetry that was distinctly American and democratic in its outlook. He wrote in simple language, so that regular people could access his poetry easily. Whitman’s poetry dwells on many of the themes that were important in American Romanticism. In his work big doses of nature, as well as reflections on freedom and democracy, and an emphasis on individualism and the imagination, have been found. He is the Poet Laureate of Romanticism.

● Caspar David Friedrich ● Francisco Goya Artists ● William Blake ● J. M. W. Turner ● John Constable ● Thomas Gainsborough ● Henry Fuseli ● Eugene Delacroix Artwork Wanderer above the Sea of Fog The Nightmare

Painting by: Caspar David Friedrich Painting by: Henry Fuseli