Romantic Era Essay

Everyone in this society has his or her own definition of the word “romantic. ” The word gives off the notion of “sentiment and sentimentality, a visionary or idealistic lack of reality. It connotes fantasy and fiction. It has been associated with different times and with distant places: the island of Bali, the world of the Arabian Nights, the age of the troubadours and even Manhattan. ”(Kreis) Romanticism is used all over the world as it relates to many different things. From advertisements in stores to billboards all over the country there is some sort of display of romanticism in everything.

Advertisements that show jewelry stores, make up, and even things as simple as brands of gum are some examples of where romanticism is used in everyday life. “The Romantic era was a time of great change and emancipation. While the Classical era had strict laws of balance and restraint, the Romantic era moved away from that by allowing artistic freedom, experimentation, and creativity.

The music of this time period was very expressive, and melody became the dominant feature.

Composers even used this expressive means to display nationalism. This became a driving force in the late Romantic period, as composers used elements of folk music to express their cultural identity. ”(library. thinkquest. org) Throughout history there has been disputes about the real meaning of what romantic really means. Does it have full meaning when someone says “a romantic, candle lit dinner”? or if someone says that watching the sunset was “a romantic setting”? No one really knows the actual meaning of the word.

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But literary historians and critics as well as European historians have been quarreling over the meaning of the word Romanticism for decades, as Lovejoy’s comment above makes abundantly clear. One of the problems is that the Romantics were liberals and conservatives, revolutionaries and reactionaries. Some were preoccupied with God, others were atheistic to the core. Some began their lives as devout Catholics, lived as ardent revolutionaries and died as staunch conservatives. ”(Kreis) “The expression Romantic gained currency during its own time, roughly 1780-1850.

The Romantic Age

However, even within its own period of existence, few Romantics would have agreed on a general meaning. Perhaps this tells us something. To speak of a Romantic era is to identify a period in which certain ideas and attitudes arose, gained currency and in most areas of intellectual endeavor, became dominant. That is, they became the dominant mode of expression. Which tells us something else about the Romantics: expression was perhaps everything to them — expression in art, music, poetry, drama, literature and philosophy. Just the same, older ideas did not simply wither away. (Kreis) Once the Romantic era took place people started to develop their own ideas about different things such as human nature and even religious ideas were formed. “The philosophes were too objective — they chose to see human nature as something uniform. The philosophes had also attacked the Church because it blocked human reason. The Romantics attacked the Enlightenment because it blocked the free play of the emotions and creativity. The philosophe had turned man into a soulless, thinking machine — a robot. ”(Kreis)