theinwardsources:literature meme | [2/2] MOVEMENTS: RomanticismThere is pleasure in the pathless woo

theinwardsources:literature meme | [2/2] MOVEMENTS: RomanticismThere is pleasure in the pathless woods,There is a rapture on the lonely shore,There is society, where none intrudes,By the deep sea, and music in its roar:I love not man the less, but Nature more,From these our interviews, in which I stealFrom all I may be, or have been before,To mingle with the Universe, and feelWhat I can ne’er express, yet cannot all conceal.(Canto IV, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Lord Byron)The movement validated strong emotion as an authentic source of aesthetic experience, placing new emphasis on such emotions as apprehension, horror and terror, and awe—especially that which is experienced in confronting the sublimity of untamed nature and its picturesque qualities, both new aesthetic categories. It elevated folk art and ancient custom to something noble, made spontaneity a desirable characteristic, and argued for a “natural” epistemology of human activities as conditioned by nature in the form of language and customary usage. (×)Some authors: William Blake, Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, José de Espronceda, Théophile Gautier, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Victor Hugo, John Keats, Edgar Allan Poe, Alexander Pushkin, Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Wordsworth… -- source link

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