Title: Overview of Romanticism in Literature
Headings: Overview of Romanticism in Literature
Overview of Romanticism in Literature
Content: 7 The Romantics believed that through close attention, the most ordinary, quotidian objects, emotions, and experiences could be elevated to the extraordinary. Another characteristic of Romanticism, as expressed by Shelley in his Defence, was the belief that emotions and relationships were not just important, but were the very currency of life. Rather than functioning as a cog in a wheel, mechanically and unaware of the other parts comprising the whole machine, Shelley argued that: The great secret of mortals is love…and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own. A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. 8 While some of the Romantics were more inwardly focused than the kind of engagement that Shelley called for so passionately in his Defence, they tended to agree on the major characteristics of Romanticism: the valuation of intensely felt emotion, the importance of creative expression, and the possibility of transcending ordinary experience, which was referred to as achieving a state of sublimity. 9 As Bloom and Trilling explain, the meaning of sublimity changed between the Enlightenment and Romantic periods: “