He stressed naturalness in education and religion and simplicity in government, and thus attacked the very ramparts of the entrenched institutions which fostered traditionalism - the literati, the Church, and absolutism. As an antidote, he saw a neo-primitive return to more natural ways for restoring the soul to humanity. To this end, he was quick to point out that invention and artifact - the proliferation of culture - had done more to hurt humanity than to benefit it. A contemporary of the French Philosophs, he was one of the first to cry out at the stultification of the Age of Reason. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, his ideas were upon the lips of every educated person. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78) is usually called the father of romanticism. The writers of the Enlightenment had preached human perfectibility ad nauseam they described man as flourishing in a world which was completely rational and utterly predictable.
Romanticism came to be a new way of viewing man and his relationship to his environment. The world was ripe for a great rebirth of human spirit. In order to appreciate his poetry fully, it is helpful to place it in the historical setting in which it was composed.īasically, the romantic mood was a reaction to the neoclassical Age of Reason - the age of Newton and Locke in England, Leibniz and the Encyclopaedists on the Continent. He wrote some of the first romantic poetry. Wordsworth was one of these indeed, he was one of the very first. The men who partook of this temper came to be known as romantics. The doctrines it represented and the literary and artistic works it produced came to be known as romanticism. Between 17, the intellectual life of Europe came to be dominated by what historians have referred to since as the romantic mood.
0 kommentar(er)
