Romantic Obsessions

• The Romantic Movement was essentially a reaction against the reductionist logic of the Enlightenment, the Greco-Roman forms and highfalutin diction of Augustan Era poetry, the mechanistic conception of the universe according to Newtonian physics, and the rigid class hierarchy of the old order that influenced everything.  It championed those traits that the preceding age disparaged: emotion over reason, intuition over empiricism, mystery over science, smudges over straight lines, Nature over civilization, the individual over social class, colloquial speech over professional terminology, the orient over the west, individual opinion over institutional dogma. 
  
  Consider Star Wars. Think of the Rebellion and everything that Ben Ken-obi, Luke Sky-walker, and Yoda stand for, and you will begin to understand Romanticism (and Gothic literature). Think of the Empire and everything that Darth Vader and the Emperor stand for, and you will begin to understand what the Romantics thought about the Augustan Age (the Age of Enlightenment). 

• Romanticism's Obsessions (some of the following are contrasts that are not exclusive, but rather give a priority of one over the other):
  • Symbiotic relationship between the imagination and Nature
  • The subjective, inner life of the poet
  • The Sublime - terrifying beauty (think of a volcano or the rugged Alps jutting up like a great white's dorsal fin)
  • Romantic Orientalism - the mysteriousness of the east
  • Ancient ruins - man's fleeting grandeur surpassed by Nature's permanence
  • Intuition and spontaneous feeling over rationalism and premeditated thought
  • Creativity over logic
  • Individual freedom over social law
  • Mortality, mystery, supernaturalism 
  • Solitary sufferer 
   
• Other Romantic characteristics 
• Romanticism turned away from the eighteenth-century emphasis on reason and artifice. Instead, the Romantics embraced imagination and naturalness. 
• Romantic-era poets rejected the public, formal, and witty works of the previous century. They preferred poetry that spoke of personal experiences and emotions, often in simple, unadorned language. 
• The Romantics each used the lyric as the form best suited to expressions of feeling, self-revelation, and the imagination.
• Wordsworth urged poets to adopt a democratic attitude toward their audiences; though endowed with a special sensibility, the poet was always “a man speaking to men.” 
• Many Romantics turned to a past or an inner dream world that they felt was more picturesque and magical than the ugly industrial age they lived in.
• Most Romantics believed in individual liberty and sympathized with those who rebelled against tyranny.
• The Romantics thought of nature as transformative; they were fascinated by the ways nature and the human mind “mirrored” the other’s creative properties.