The Romantic Movement

The Romantic Movement

Muhammad Zia

Lecturer in English

The various features which give identity to the Romantic Movement can all be found in other periods as well. What matters is that those features have greater frequency and prominence of occurrence in the Romantic Movement than at other times. In England, the heyday of the Movement was from 1798 to 1832, though of course there is no clear-cut demarcation: some features can be traced back through the 18th century to the age of Pope and beyond that to the Elizabethans, to Chaucer and ultimately to the Garden of Eden; and similarly the movement didn't suddenly cease to be, but rather flowed on, evolving and mutating, through the 19th century and in the 20th.

The distinguishing features of the Romantic Movement, which interlink and overlap, are these:

1. Special prestige is accorded to the greatly talented individual who can be seen as a rebel against social tradition and convention.

2. The subjective vision becomes highly valued as a means of social therapy or transformation.

3. Instead of accepting orthodox religion, the individual seeks some absolute centre of values in intense private experience.

4. Nature, in her wilder, awe-inspiring or luxurious aspects, often provides the occasion of such intense experience.

5. The individual exists in a paradoxical situation, being pulled in opposite directions: towards solitary experience but also towards sociable experience; towards the lonely pursuit of some high ideal but also towards a close relationship with fellow beings. This is related to the tension between the transcendent and the mundane. Politically the tension is between faith in some charismatic leader and faith in democratic movements.

6. The individual seeks revolution in society or a transformation in human nature, or perhaps both at once.

7. Conversely, he may oppose revolution by appealing to the sense that society is an organism which rightly revolves slowly and steadily.

8. Anti-rational ideas become widespread. The rational, conscious mind is criticized in the name of unconscious wisdom, instant responsiveness, sensual hedonism, or vigorously passionate conduct.

9. Sometimes orthodox ethical judgement may be subverted by appeal to 'ontological fullness' (sheer fullness of being) as opposed to, say, a constructive prudential existence.

10. Dreams and drugged or entranced states are accorded special prestige; the outlooks of children, savages and the deranged are even regarded as privileged.

11. The status of culture-hero or tutelary spirit is assigned to men of the past who can be seen as spontaneous geniuses, breaking rules by their eruptive creativity (Shakespeare, for example), or who can be seen as lonely rebels, defying their society (the aged Milton), or as unappreciated martyrs (Chatterton); and to defiant liberators in history or legend (Prometheus), to great rebels (Milton's Satan) or brave patriots who strove to free nations from subjection (Tadeusz Kosciuzko or William Tell).

12. Writers search the national past in order to establish a patriotic cultural tradition (turning perhaps to Arthurian legend and mediaeval chivalry, to ballads and folklore, to the poetry of Chaucer and Spenser).

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