Life and Nature - Scf - State College of Florida

Romanticism
C. Hugh Holman and William Harmon define Romanticism as: “a movement
of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that marked the reaction in literature,
philosophy, art, religion, and politics from neoclassicism and formal orthodoxy of
the preceding period” (“Definitions from A Handbook to Literature”).
Professor Glanville from State College of Florida found another way to
describe Romanticism: it “focused on novelty of experience, extreme emotional
highs and lows, and the glorification of nature. Romantic writers and characters
view the world around them through the lens of emotion and subjectivity”
(“Literary Movement Lecture – Romanticism”).
There are many ways to describe and define Romanticism, but when it
comes to Canadian poet Robert W. Service, the second definition is more
relatable because of his “glorification of nature.” In Alfred Drake‟s words from
California State University, “Romantics consider „nature‟ as the antithesis of
inherited and institutionalized practices of though, self-self alienated ways of
making sense and assigning values and priorities” (“The Romantic
Understanding of Nature”). Nature can overcome the traditional religious
aspect of a Romantic‟s life because when there is religion, there is always
“doubt,” and nature takes that “doubt” away.