Romanticism

To romanticize the world is to make us aware of the magic, mystery and wonder of the world; it is to educate the senses to see the ordinary as extraordinary, the familiar as strange, the mundane as sacred, the finite as infinite.
~ Novalis

Romanticism (also the Romantic era or the Romantic period) was an artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in Europe toward the end of the 18th century and in most areas was at its peak in the approximate period from 1800 to 1850. It was partly a reaction to the Industrial Revolution, the social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment, and the scientific rationalization of nature.

Quotes

• Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject nor exact truth, but in the way of feeling.

• Charles Baudelaire, Salon de 1846, p. 85

• I am eternally, devastatingly romantic, and I thought people would see it because 'romantic' doesn't mean 'sugary.' It's dark and tormented — the furor of passion, the despair of an idealism that you can't attain.
  • Catherine Breillat, "Catherine Breillat Bares Her Romantic Side" in The New York Sun (20 June 2008)

• What is Classical is healthy; what is Romantic is sick.
  • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Maxims and Reflections (1833), maxim 1031
  • Original text:
    Das Klassische nenne ich das Gesunde und das Romantische das Kranke.

• What was the Romantic School in Germany? It was nothing else but the reawakening of the poetry of the Middle Ages, as it had shown itself in its songs, images, and architecture, in art and in life.

• Heinrich Heine, The Romantic School (1833-1835) as quoted in The Main Tendencies of Victorian Poetry: Studies in the Thought and Art of the Greater Poets (1907), p. 184

• To romanticize the world is to make us aware of the magic, mystery and wonder of the world; it is to educate the senses to see the ordinary as extraordinary, the familiar as strange, the mundane as sacred, the finite as infinite.

• Novalis, as quoted in "Bildung in Early German Romanticism" by Frederick C. Beiser, in Philosophers on Education : Historical Perspectives (1998) by Amélie Rorty, p. 294

• Romanticism is no sign of powerful instincts, but, on the contrary, of a weak, self-detesting intellect. They are all infantile, these Romantics; men who remain children too long (or for ever), without the strength to criticize themselves, but with perpetual inhibitions arising from the obscure awareness of their own personal weakness; who are impelled by the morbid idea of reforming society, which is to them too masculine, too healthy, too sober. ...

And these same everlasting "youths" are with us again today, immature, destitute of the slightest experience or even real desire for experience, but writing and talking away about politics, fired by uniforms and badges, and clinging fantastically to some theory or other. There is a social Romanticism of sentimental Communists, a political Romanticism which regards election figures and the intoxication of mass-meeting oratory as deeds, and an economic Romanticism which trickles out from behind the gold theories of sick minds that know nothing of the inner forms of modern economics. They can only feel in the mass, where they can deaden the dull sense of their weakness by multiplying themselves. And this they call the Overcoming of Individualism.

• Oswald Spengler, The Hour of Decision 19 August 1933

External links

• Encyclopedic article on Romanticism on Wikipedia
• Media related to Romanticism on Wikimedia Commons
• The dictionary definition of Romanticism on Wiktionary