On the Road to Romanticism

The marked adherence to the neoclassical ideals, qualities, and attributes (especially during the first third of the century) made the period prone to a breakdown in agreement. And that is essentially what happened. During most of the 18th century there was a process of quiet, uneven evolution. The middle decades were, however, "years of changing values and new points of view, years in which the emotions and the imagination began to destroy the perfect balance and harmony which neo-classic art sought in theory" (S. H. Monk). By the fifth century of the decade, these divergent impulses began to find "positive and well-organized expression." However, one should not think of the change as an open rebellion against the tenets of Swift and Pope. Writers simply began exerting their individuality or originality, evading neoclassic traditions.

What developed over the period were a cluster of relatively weak tendencies which came to the fore as a result of the lucky coincidence of the brilliance, the genius of the Romantic writers (ca. 1790-1830). Between 1770 and 1795, for example, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Byron, Keats, Lamb, Hazlitt, and DeQuincey were born. Those relatively weak tendencies were:

1. Release and cultivation of the feelings

Sentiment: usually employed in a good sense, implying qualities such as the power to express or evoke delicacy or tenderness of feeling, idealism, high and ennobling thought

Sentimentality: always mawkishness, affectation, or excess emotion; sometimes suggests manufactured or false emotion.

Sensibility: keenly impressionistic nature and unusually delicate powers of appreciation or its opposite; believed to be essential in the later century for artistic endeavor

Philosophical melancholy: stimulation of powerful feelings for their own sake. (Consciously cultivated enjoyment of sadness; preoccupation with death, physical corruption, churchyards at night, spectral moonlight, graves, skeletons, and worms). This tendency is found in the "Graveyard School" of poetry. Examples of this school are:

Edward Young, "Night Thoughts," 1741-45
Robert Blair, "The Grave" 1743
Thomas Gray, "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," 1745

Click here for an excerpt from Blair's "The Grave."

Methodism: regeneration of feeling (enthusiasm); religion became an affair of the heart, not the head. Important as a precursor of Romanticism because of its sympathy with the oppressed and the suffering and the contribution its concept of individual personal worth regardless of social station made to the emerging spirit of democracy.