What exactly is romanticism?, i never knew the answer and never found one, until
I stumbled on the words of a romanticist, who himself didn't know exactly what it meant.
Eugene Delacroix, perhaps the most celebrated of French romantic painters, wrote in his Journal, “If by my Romanticism people mean the free display of my personal impressions, my remoteness from the servile copies repeated ad nauseum in academies of art and my extreme distaste for academic formulae, then yes, I am indeed a Romantic.”
I didn't know, that this was romanticism, and this is how romanticists felt. Had I known, I wouldn't have feared that I was alone in my melancholy and fear:
Where the enlightenment had enshrined reason, the romantics instead celebrated madness. Where the enlightenment had criticized enthusiasm and had distrusted the emotional nature of human beings, romanticism called on human beings to trust their instincts and feelings.
I stumbled on the words of a romanticist, who himself didn't know exactly what it meant.
Eugene Delacroix, perhaps the most celebrated of French romantic painters, wrote in his Journal, “If by my Romanticism people mean the free display of my personal impressions, my remoteness from the servile copies repeated ad nauseum in academies of art and my extreme distaste for academic formulae, then yes, I am indeed a Romantic.”
I didn't know, that this was romanticism, and this is how romanticists felt. Had I known, I wouldn't have feared that I was alone in my melancholy and fear:
Where the enlightenment had enshrined reason, the romantics instead celebrated madness. Where the enlightenment had criticized enthusiasm and had distrusted the emotional nature of human beings, romanticism called on human beings to trust their instincts and feelings.
Where the enlightenment had held up science as the ideal of human achievement, the romantics instead emphasized poetry.
Where the enlightenment had emphasized progress, the romantics sought to return to an idealized past, while simultaneously realizing the impossibility of such a return.
Therefore, the romantics replaced the enlightenment's optimism with a sense of tragedy and melancholia - from the website: http://www.temple.edu/ih/Romanticism/RomaticismPowerpoint.htm
If being nostalgic about olden times, because you feel far away from nature now, and if disliking anything that takes you away from nature is romantisicm, i am a die hard romaticist. And I feel the need for a romanticism right now.
'civilization is the limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities' ...Mark Twain.
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