Title: Romanticism
Headings: Introduction to Romanticism
Introduction to Romanticism
Historical Considerations
Imagination
Nature
Symbolism and Myth
Other Concepts: Emotion, Lyric Poetry, and the Self
Contrasts With Neoclassicism
Individualism: The Romantic Hero
The Everyday and the Exotic
The Romantic Artist in Society
Spread of the Romantic Spirit
Recent Developments

Content: Romantic nature poetry is essentially a poetry of meditation. Symbolism and Myth
Symbolism and myth were given great prominence in the Romantic conception of art. In the Romantic view, symbols were the human aesthetic correlatives of nature's emblematic language. They were valued too because they could simultaneously suggest many things, and were thus thought superior to the one-to-one communications of allegory. Partly, it may have been the desire to express the "inexpressible"--the infinite--through the available resources of language that led to symbol at one level and myth (as symbolic narrative) at another. Other Concepts: Emotion, Lyric Poetry, and the Self
Other aspects of Romanticism were intertwined with the above three concepts. Emphasis on the activity of the imagination was accompanied by greater emphasis on the importance of intuition, instincts, and feelings, and Romantics generally called for greater attention to the emotions as a necessary supplement to purely logical reason. When this emphasis was applied to the creation of poetry, a very important shift of focus occurred. Wordsworth's definition of all good poetry as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" marks a turning point in literary history.