Title: Romanticism - Wikipedia
Headings: Romanticism
Romanticism
Contents
Defining Romanticism
Basic characteristics
Etymology
Period
Context and place in history
Literature
Germany
Great Britain
Scotland
France
Poland
Russia
Spain
Portugal
Italy
South America
United States
Influence of European Romanticism on American writers
Architecture
Visual arts
Music
Outside the arts
Sciences
Historiography
Theology
Chess
Romantic nationalism
Polish nationalism and messianism
Gallery
Emerging Romanticism in the 18th century
French Romantic painting
Other
Romantic authors
Scholars of Romanticism
See also
References
Citations
Sources
Further reading
External links

Content: As well as rules, the influence of models from other works was considered to impede the creator's own imagination, so that originality was essential. The concept of the genius, or artist who was able to produce his own original work through this process of creation from nothingness, is key to Romanticism, and to be derivative was the worst sin. This idea is often called "romantic originality". Translator and prominent Romantic August Wilhelm Schlegel argued in his Lectures on Dramatic Arts and Letters that the most phenomenal power of human nature is its capacity to divide and diverge into opposite directions. William Blake, The Little Girl Found, from Songs of Innocence and Experience, 1794
Not essential to Romanticism, but so widespread as to be normative, was a strong belief and interest in the importance of nature. This particularly in the effect of nature upon the artist when he is surrounded by it, preferably alone. In contrast to the usually very social art of the Enlightenment, Romantics were distrustful of the human world, and tended to believe a close connection with nature was mentally and morally healthy. Romantic art addressed its audiences with what was intended to be felt as the personal voice of the artist. So, in literature, "much of romantic poetry invited the reader to identify the protagonists with the poets themselves". According to Isaiah Berlin, Romanticism embodied "a new and restless spirit, seeking violently to burst through old and cramping forms, a nervous preoccupation with perpetually changing inner states of consciousness, a longing for the unbounded and the indefinable, for perpetual movement and change, an effort to return to the forgotten sources of life, a passionate effort at self-assertion both individual and collective, a search after means of expressing an unappeasable yearning for unattainable goals".