English practice 58

How Romantic!

When you hear the word romantic, you probably think to “chick flick” movies and Valentine’s Day, but the time in history known as the Romantic Period was a lot more exciting than that. In Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, communities of writers, painters, and musicians stifled by the rationality and orderliness of the Age of Enlightenment, and started producing work that emphasized uncontrollable emotion and the dark side of Nature.

Most people think of classical music as “relaxing,” but the of Romantic musicians like Beethoven and Wagner are anything but, and would come to influence rock and roll music over a century later. In the visual arts, painters like Henry Fuseli and Eugène Delacroix created disturbing, chaotic works emphasizing struggle, fear, and today’s horror and “goth” imagery.

the movement is most closely associated with literature, and indeed Romanticism radically changed people’s ideas not only of the function of literature, but also of what writers themselves like. Previously, most famous writers had been educated aristocrats who wrote complex works about human society, but the reflective nature poems of William Wordsworth and the short, sad life of the brilliant, struggling commoner John Keats have much more in common with how we think of poetry and poets today.

Perhaps Romanticism’s most influential innovation was the “Byronic hero,” named for the central figures in the works of rebellious English poet Lord Byron.

a supremely gifted individual troubled by a 8 dark past, torn between good and evil, and plagued by tragic love affairs, the figure of the Byronic hero is everywhere in pop culture even today,

The Romantic Movement science. Researchers turned their attention away from the microscope and toward the dynamic forces of electricity and magnetism. [A] The fascination with nature inspired the new science of biology. [B] And the emphasis on mystery and human behavior led to the beginnings of what would eventually become psychology. [C] most artistic movements fade into history, of interest mainly to academics, the ideals and 12 aesthetics of Romanticism have remained popular and continue to influence mainstream culture to this day, whether people know it or not. [D]