Romanticism Period

1. By: Zach Owen Romanticism Period

2. Definition • Romanticism was a complex artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe. It gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution.

3. More Description • Mostly, it was a revolt against aristocratic social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment and a reaction against the scientific rationalization of nature. It was seen most strongly in the visual arts, music, and literature, but had a major impact on education and natural history.

4. Early Romanticism • The early Romantic period coincides with what is often called the "age of revolutions“ including the American (1776) and the French (1789) revolutions. An age of upheavals in political, economic, and social traditions, the age that witnessed the initial transformations of the Industrial Revolution. A revolutionary energy was also at the core of Romanticism. This consciously set out to transform not only the theory and practice of poetry (and all art), but the very way we perceive the world.

5. Romanticism • Romanticism express a emotional movement where artists, writers, musicians, expressed their emotions through their works. This was placing new emphasis on such emotions as trepidation, horror, terror and awe

6. Reaching out • Romanticism reached beyond the rational and Classicist ideal models to elevate a revived medievalism and elements of art and narrative perceived to be authentically medieval, in an attempt to escape the confines of population growth, urban sprawl, and industrialism, and it also attempted to embrace the exotic, unfamiliar, and distant in modes.

7. Understanding • The modern sense of a romantic character may be expressed in Byronic ideals of a gifted, or perhaps misunderstood loner, creatively following the reasons of his inspiration rather than the dictates of contemporary society.

8. Origin • Although the movement was rooted in the German movement, which prized intuition and emotion over Enlightenment rationalism, the ideologies and events of the French Revolution laid the background from which both the Romanticism and Counter-Enlightenment periods emerged.

9. Nature •   "Nature" meant many things to the Romantics. It was often presented as itself a work of art, constructed by a divine imagination, in emblematic language. For example, throughout "Song of Myself," Whitman makes a practice of presenting commonplace items in nature such as "ants“. Nature was also a healing power, a source of subject and image, a refuge from the artificial constructs of civilization, including artificial language.

10. Symbolism • Symbolism was widely used in romanticism. Symbolism and myth were given great prominence in the Romantic conception of art. In the Romantic view, symbols were the human correlatives of nature's eccentric 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.

11. Poetry • Poetry of this period was focused on feelings more than reason. Poetry was said to be and over controlling feeling to express yourself. Romanticism poets include: • William BlakeWilliam Wordsworth Samuel Taylor ColeridgeGeorge Gordon, Lord ByronPercy ByssheShelleyJohn Keats

12. Poet • William Wordsworth was a famous romanticism poet. He was born in 1770 and died in 1850. He wrote the Lyrical Ballads of “Tintern Abbey”, “We Are Seven”, and “Lines Written In Early Spring” • 'poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings' (Wordsworth)

13. Musicians • The Romantic era produced many more composers whose names and music are still familiar and popular today: Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Schumann, Schubert, Chopin, and Wagner are perhaps the most well-known. Ludwig van Beethoven, possibly the most famous composer of all, is harder to place. His early works are from the Classical period But his later music, including the majority of his most famous music, is just as clearly Romantic.

14. Musician • Ludwig van Beethoven was one of the most famous musicians not mainly from the romanticism period but his later works reflected many of the same ideas during this period. His most famous piece of work is Fur Elise.

15. Artists • Romantic artists were fascinated by the nature of their time, the genius, their passions and inner struggles, their moods, mental potentials, and the heroes. They investigated human nature and personality, the folk culture, the national and ethnic origins, the medieval era, the remote, the mysterious, the occult, the diseased, and even somesatanic.

16. Hudson River School • Hudson River School opened to train and instruct artist and was the first American school of landscape painting active from 1835-1870. The subjects of their art were romantic spectacles from the Hudson River Valley and upstate New York. The artist Thomas Cole is synonymous with this region and first leader of the group. Other famous artists of the group are George Caleb Bingham, Asher B. Durand, Thomas Moran, Albert Bierstadt, Frederic Edwin Church, George Inness, and John Frederic Kensett.

17. Artist • Albert Bierstadt was the first of artist to paint the mountains of west America. Born in 1830 and died in 1902. Born in Germany emigrated to the US in 1832. He returned to Germany to Study Art only to return to the US 3 years later. He mainly painted in his New York Studio.

18. individual • The Romantics asserted the importance of the individual, the unique, and even the eccentric. Consequently they opposed the character typology of neoclassical drama. In another way Romanticism created its own literary types. The hero-artist has already been mentioned

19. Romantics • The Romantics were ambivalent toward the "real" social world around them. They were often politically and socially involved in many ways, but at the same time they began to distance themselves from the public’s eye. High Romantic artists interpreted things through their own emotions, and these emotions included social and political consciousness. As one would expect in a period of revolution, one that reacted so strongly to oppression and the injustice in the world.

20. Today • Whether or not this is so, it is clear that Romanticism transformed Western culture in many ways that survive into our own times. Many of the Artist, musicians, and painters works have survived and thrived over time. It is only very recently that any really significant turning away from Romantic paradigms has begun to take place.