2.1 Characteristics of Romanticism

Notes

Romanticism was a literary movement of the early to mid 1800s that valued emotion, imagination and the individual over strict reason and social rules.

• Key features: strong emotion, nature as a source of beauty and truth, the individual and the imagination, interest in the past, the mysterious and the supernatural.
• It reacted against the Enlightenment's focus on logic and against industrialization.
• American Romantics often celebrated the new nation's wilderness and creative independence.
• Worked example: a poem in which a wanderer finds peace and meaning alone in the mountains shows Romantic values of nature and individualism.