Romanticism: historical movement, characteristics and cultural impact

Romanticism: A disdain for the unities of form and the embrace of the unities of genre

The integral relationship between the visual and verbal genres of the Romantic period of letters is perhaps one of its most striking aspects. Poetry and painting in particular seemed to be fused in a homogenous blend of intense individualism, emphasis on naturalism, and a stress upon spontaneous human feeling, with all of its imperfections. One of Romanticism's earliest literary progenitors, William Blake, perhaps most perfectly embodies this aspect of Romantic artistic philosophy. Blake illustrated his theological poems with strikingly drawn and painted figures from the Bible. To appreciate the artist's work in its totality, and his individualistic theological point-of-view, one must observe the poem in the form it was originally designed, as paired with the author's illustrations.

However, this integral relationship between the visual art of painting and the verbal art of poetry is not exclusive to those artists who merged these two talents in their careers, as did Blake. Even writers such as William Wordsworth whom strictly identified themselves as poets, for instance, are notable in the striking visual imagery of their poems, in contrast to the Classicist emphasis on verbal wit. In the pre-Romantic art of Alexander Pope, for instance, it is the words that matter, the verbal art of the couplet and the sound of the poem, rather than the image created and generated in the mind of the reader, as in Wordsworth's oeuvre.

The more sensuous, less intellectual and visual aspects of painting were also keeping with the Romantic emphasis on spontaneously generated feeling as the font of all art, rather than the largely geometrical, Neo-Classical skill of grammatical and technical constructions of irony in couplets and aphorisms. However, it would not be enough to merely say that literary Romantic fascination with visual art uniquely placed an emphasis on the visual. 18th Neo-Classicism's emphasis upon the architecture and beauty of the perfected human form had its own visual component. But Romanticism, in contrast, stressed the construction of a 'natural' world, of humanity's subjective, pictorial gaze upon the natural in painting and poetry. Painting, during the Romantic period, became more narrative in its subject, and poetry became more visual and focused upon individual moments, rather than making pronouncements upon philosophical generalizations, as during the Neo-Classical Age of Enlightenment and Irony.

It also should be noted that, its adherents did not see 19th Romanticism's blurring of the genres of painting and writing as necessarily a break with a previous tradition. Romanticism, by its advocates, was viewed a return to a lost tradition and a better way of apprehending the Classical legacy and the Middle Ages. For instance, the Romantic stress upon individual and spontaneous responses affected the style of poetic works such as Keats, whose "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer," stresses the personal, spontaneous encounter of a Greek, Classical text of an individual denied the ability to translate the Greek himself. Keats becomes a personal part of this tradition, now that he can feel excitement at reading an excellent translation.

The subject-oriented emphasis on simplicity and 'the common folk' is also reflected in the subject matter of Romantic painting, which often showed peasants from the present, as well as satyrs from the Classical past. Historical subject matter of exotic settings such as "The Wreck of the Hesperus," embraced not only the Romantic love of exotic worlds, but also the 'story' or narrative element so particular to the Romantic consciousness. The painting tells a story of a shipwreck, rather than simply depicting an emotion in the abstract or a 'great event'

Thus, even though exotic or mythological settings were not new elements of painting or of poetic verse, the self-consciously 'storied' element and the focus on particular individual figures certainly were. Romanticism's influence spanned the genres because it was not simply a self-conscious style, but an ethos or philosophy. The introduction of personal 'takes' on historical events also stressed the individual encounter with history, such as common individuals involved in a famous shipwreck. Even the classical and folkloric depictions of mythology in Romanticism focused on sensual, smaller events, such as the adventures of Pan, rather than great heroic epics of the many, and heroes. The personalized vision of William Blake's version of the Bible, the spontaneous response of Keats to a translation Homer rather than a 'god's eye' view of the text, and even the later David paintings of Napoleon, the great leader, all have their roots in the Romantic tradition, for all have an immediacy and personalization of individualized focus that disdains hierarchy, form, and even symmetry.