Assignment task:
In what sense is Romanticism a reaction to the Enlightenment? What in your opinion did Romanticism as a movement of arts and ideas contribute to the 19th century?
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Romanticism Industrialization and its discontents were felt not only in social and political agitation but in broader trends in arts and culture. While some in the late 18th and early 19th century saw industrialization as progress, others worried it was dehumanizing and alienating people from a healthy relationship to Nature and the environment. Romanticism in art was part of the broader rebellion against the social and material consequences of Industrialization. For Romantics, Industrialization was pushing human nature into an inhuman mold, a soulless factory where the human spirit served the precision watch of mechanized mass production. This cultural rebellion began to redefine art into a form of defiance to the new mass consumer culture of the Industrial era. Romanticism in art signified a new focus on the uniqueness of individual experience and a challenge to the mechanistic model of Nature then associated with Newtonian science. Romanticism challenged Enlightenment assumptions about the power of Reason. Why would Nature necessarily privilege, either materially or for the sake of human happiness, "Reason" over the passions or over the imagination? If Galileo could say that the language of Nature was mathematics, the Romantic reply would be that math was never the language of human relationships to Nature or each other. Newton and the Scientific Revolution presented a mechanistic universe, atoms in motion, Creation as like a precision watch with movable parts. Romantics argued that Creation and human experience was organic and not mechanistic. There was a wholeness to Being that was lost when it was artificially broken up into scientific categories. M.H. Abrams' standard Glossary of literary terms marks the start of a "self-conscious" English Romantic poetry with William Wordsworth's (1770- 1850) "Preface" to his and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's (1772-1834) Lyrical Ballads (1800). In the "Preface" Wordsworth rejected classical rules about proper forms and subjects of poetry. He argued instead for an authentic voice based on a free imagination, everyday language about everyday things, and "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings". This could stand equally as a summation of the later musical compositions of Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) and Franz Liszt (1811-1886) or the paintings of Joseph Turner (1775-1851). In the visual arts Turner's landscapes and maritime paintings featured Nature as finally dominating and beyond human control. Like Wordsworth, Turner's Nature inspires equal parts awe and wonder, mystery and dread, and finally will not be comprehended by Reason alone. For Romantics everyday encounters with people and Nature was a touchstone for meditation and symbols of the deeper meanings inscribed into Nature which science could not comprehend. Romantics did not so much paint or write or compose music about Nature as they communed with Nature as a spiritual experience connecting themselves and their being to Creation. Romantics were thus much more open to religion and religious experiences. In Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey he described his relationship to Nature as finally inward and spiritual, recognizing, he wrote, "In nature and the language of the sense/The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,/The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul/Of all my moral being." This was a clear and self-conscious defiance of Enlightenment rationalism and the pursuit of scientific objectivity. Whether in literature, music or the visual arts Romantics set out to break conventional rules and push the boundaries of artistic expression. In the process they redefined art forever, linking it to nonconformity and rebellion. Today we assume as normal the artist as social critic and commentator, music as a voice of protest and "counter culture" offering an alternative to corporate consumer society. The legacy of the Romantics in art can be seen in the simple fact that art today is not associated with math and science (as it once was during the Renaissance) but with subjective states of mind and a certain defiance of the conventional norms of a dominant scientific and commercial civilization.