Why the Romantics valued what they did:

Values feeling and intuition over reason Following your passion or emotion instead of logic or revelation

After the rise of Deism or rationalism, along with the promises the scientists made about making life better, people were dismayed to find that what the inventors had created was a society full of factories where people worked long hours in dirty, dangerous conditions.  The environment became polluted; cities were full of ugly squalor.  People began to say there must be something more than analysis and logic and science.  Their lives, spent working to increase someone else’s wealth, weren’t filled with anything but monotony at the assembly lines at the factories.  They wanted to imagine a different kind of world, filled with more passion.

Places faith in inner experience and the power of the imagination.

The Romantics decided that what a person imagined or felt was more “true”, more important, than the actual mundane facts.

Shuns the artificiality of civilization and seeks unspoiled nature

The Romantics saw the society the Deists had created as full of traditions left over from the European culture and class system.  They wanted to escape to a simpler time and to a simpler more innocent culture (Rousseau’s “Noble Savage”)

Prefers youthful innocence to educated sophistication.

 high-born

Rejected the European idea that the upper class or wealthy were the important people. Rejected being ruled by others who didn’t care about their welfare—wanted to make own rules instead of going with society’s traditions.

Contemplates nature’s beauty as a path to spiritual and moral development

Thought you could learn more about God, “The Artist” through looking at nature than you could learn in a house of worship.

Looks backward to the wisdom of the past and distrusts progress.

The scientists led us down the “primrose path” and we don’t like the results.

Searching for beauty or truth, the quest

Looking for human  or idea to devote life to

The supernatural or occult

Investigated trying to understand what happens after death since threw out revelation

Fascinated by the grotesque, bizarre, violent, or exotic

The factory was predictable and monotonous.  Things completely removed from the assembly line fueled the imagination and seemed more “alive” rather than a life controlled by the speed of the machine.

The distant in time or culture

Same as above… myth, legend, folk tales, Islam, Polynesia, “primitive” peoples

 The “inner landscape” of a character

What makes a person “tick”? (Especially twisted people)—(Poe)

Emerging nationalism

We don’t have much that’s old… but we do have some things we can be proud of—our landscapes, our history….

© Pamela J. Carnie March 25, 2004

Is young, or possesses youthful qualities

Has a knowledge of people and of life based not on society’s rules but on some higher principle-- intuition

“…a  heroic, virtuous, skillful frontiersman whose simple morality, love of nature, distrust of town life, and almost superhuman resourcefulness” (Arpin 146).

Is innocent and pure of purpose

Loves nature and avoids town life

Has a sense of honor based not on society’s rules but on some higher principle

Quests for some higher truth in the natural world