To the Skylark

At end of the 18th century and into the early decades of the 19th century, a cultural movement that later came to be known as “Romanticism” swept across much of Europe. Romanticism was, paradoxically, both a product of the 18th-century Enlightenment and a reaction against it. Like prominent Enlightenment thinkers, many Romantics had a deep interest in the dignity of the individual and a tendency to idealize revolutionary ideas. They often questioned or outright rejected the social, religious, and political norms that tended to curtail or oppress the rights of the average person, and they championed freedom of feeling and expression.

However, unlike their Enlightenment predecessors, the Romantics favored feeling and instinct over the more methodical, calculating rationality of figures like Voltaire or David Hume. To this end, the Romantic poets and artists enjoyed creating works that were emotionally turbulent, from Goethe’s famous novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, to the odes to overwhelming, transportive experiences through art and nature penned by English Romantics such as Wordsworth and Keats. Romanticism and political revolution often went together hand-in-hand: As a young man, Wordsworth had been deeply interested in the French Revolution, although he later became disillusioned and more conservative in his beliefs with age. Lord Byron, of the second generation of English Romantics, died fighting for Greek independence against the Ottoman Empire. Percy Bysshe Shelley, Byron’s friend and poetic contemporary, was outspoken against social hierarchies and openly promoted controversial ideas such as atheism and free love.

Romanticism’s legacy endures in many popular conceptions surrounding art and poetry to this day. The valorization of individuality and the idea that lyric poetry reflects a poet’s genuine, private feelings and experiences is one of the lasting marks of Romanticism’s influence, as is Romanticism’s tendency to celebrate the artist as a solitary—and sometimes tortured—genius. As champions of the natural world and countryside, the Romantics have attracted considerable critical attention in recent years in studies around “ecocriticism—” the analysis of literary works through the lens of environmental concerns and depictions of nature.