The Essence of Romanticism Romanticism, which first appeared in the 1770s in Germany and England, grew out of the entanglement of thoughts and perceptions in the eighteenth century known as the Enlightenment. The Movement swept through Europe like a candle dropped in a hay barn, and by the 1820s its far-reaching flames had engulfed the French; the rest of Europe followed. Whereas the eighteenth century focused on reason and judgment, law and order, and the values of society universally, Romanticists emphasized imagination, emotion, freedom, individual worth, nature, far away places and forgotten times. Because of its many facets, attempting to define Romanticism can become haphazard and difficult, as each artist sought to express himself through the Movements many palettes. One major aspect of Romanticism was a preoccupation with nature. Much of literature championed this idol. While Rousseau’s contemporaries worship the neoclassical atheistic worldview and the accomplishments of science, he went a separate path. In his book, The Noble Savage, Jean-Jacque Rousseau birthed the concept of man as noble only in his natural state. Rousseau feels that science and society have maimed the nature of man who must live more in his natural state to become truly righteous. Rousseau goes even further in his last piece, Les Reveries du Promeneur Solitaire (Reveries of a Solitary Walker), when he implies that the only path to understanding and communing with ones self is through nature. He and other Romantic novelists and poets worshipped nature as noble, sublime, and pure, the ultimate good. As such, man, himself was to valued as an individual. Wordsworth reveals this aspect of romanticism in “She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways,” in which a common-looking woman dies, leaving a void in the life of the poet. He emphasizes the importance of the woman’s life, even though it seemed plan, to him, not for her accomplishm...
