Title: Overview of Romanticism in Literature
Headings: Overview of Romanticism in Literature
Overview of Romanticism in Literature
Content: 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: “ This sublimity [unlike that of previous eras]…is not a Sublime of great conceptions, before which the self feels small, but rather of a hoped-for potential, in which the private self turns upon infinitude, and so is found by its own greatness." 10
Romanticism was, above all, an experimental project of self and social quest, a quest for intense experiences that were felt deeply, a quest for connection, a quest for transcendence, and a quest to know the self—and, by extension, others—more profoundly. The quest did not occur, nor could it have occurred, by creating a plan to achieve it. Rather, it was through constant observation and alertness, and the devotion of attention to the most minute and seemingly unimportant details of daily life, that the self, and therefore society, had the possibility of transmuting itself into something greater. Bloom and Trilling refer to Romanticism as a “health-restoring revival of the instinctual life".