Defining Romanticism

Abstract

Romanticism has proved as hard to define as to be rid of. The age of partisanships having passed, it seems appropriate now to look at it dispassionately, yet without losing sight of its peculiar relevance to our own cultural situation. Neither the nineteenth century view (Romanticism as a vast act of liberation after the confinements of the eighteenth century), nor the modernist view (Romanticism as an orgy of subjective destructiveness after the orderliness of the Enlightenment) really stands up to close scrutiny. Contrary to many critics of the modernist period,¹ Romantic art is characteristically as solid in construction, as well-shaped, objectified and energetic as that of the eighteenth century.² Contrary to neo-Romantic critics, Romantic art does not have a monopoly of organic form, passion, seriousness or ‘the true voice of feeling’ .³ No definition of Romanticism has yet been offered, indeed, which cannot, apparently, be discredited by a host of counter-examples: the characteristics usually thought of as specifically Romantic (subjectivity, nature-worship, distrust of rationalism, hunger for wholeness, pantheism) can all be found in much work that certainly is not Romantic, yet are often absent from much that indisputably is.