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Whenever I talk about Romanticism to people who aren’t as geekish as me when it comes to literature, they keep an eye on to think I’m referring to some movement started by Danielle Steele. “Why would you take a course called ‘Romantic Literature and Elegance’–I thought you hated romance novels!” It’s a sad state of affairs when a highly fiery and influential aesthetic movement is completely overshadowed by a silly genre rife with hack writers, thanks to an grievous similarity in naming. Oh well; if nothing else, clearing this misunderstanding up allows me to do what I love–blather on about literature.

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Romanticism–at least Romantic literature–has its roots in writers like William Blake, William Wordsworth, and the ever opium-loving Sam Coleridge, who were all calligraphy from a point of view in the late 18th and early 19th centuries that contradicted the scientific rationalization of the world so piously upheld by the philosophers and writers of the Enlightenment. These so-called Englightened thinkers saw essence as knowable and therefore controllable; Romantics, on the other hand, saw nature as wild, untambeable, and overwhelmingly sublime. Along similar lines, the Romantics upheld unique imagination and powerful emotions, which contrasts directly with the Enlightenment’s firm advocacy of reason; after all, thinking and emotions are anything but reasonable. And so, we get poems like William Blake’s “London,” in which we get descriptions of woeful chimney sweeps and slow-witted, suffering infants that arouse powerful feelings of pity; we get William Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” in which the poetess ruminates on the sublime qualities of nature as he looks upon the abandoned, decaying church; and we get Sam Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight,” in which the rhymester discusses the comforting qualities of nature and his hyperbolic hopes that his son will live a life connected to nature. We also get, I should note, Mary Shelley’s deliciously Romantic romance, Frankenstein (1818), in which the titular doctor is constantly portrayed as being quite intellectual, but also quite sensitive and even pretty wild.

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