Comparing Romanticism to Enlightenment and Realism

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Romanticism emphasized emotion, sentiment, and the inner feelings of the individual. Unlike the Enlightenment that stressed the idea that there exists a natural law behind the universe and all of society, Romanticism defied this idea and asserted that you cannot place a law over the human emotion. Thus, to a large extent, Romanticism rejected the Enlightenment views of human beings and the natural world because these Enlightenment ideas blocked the human emotion and creativity.

Romanticism appealed to the bizarre and unusual. Gothic literature, such as Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, reflected Romanticism’s emphasis on the irrational. Shelley’s Frankenstein recounted the story of a scientist whose experiment of creating a humanlike monster goes awry. Other Romantics sought the unusual by pursuing extraordinary states of experience in dreams, nightmares, frenzies, and experimentation with cocaine, opium and hashish to produce altered states of consciousness. This emphasis on the irrational and illogical completely defied the Enlightenment views of order and the rational over human beings.

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Enlightened individuals, such as Voltaire, championed deism, a religious outlook built upon the Newtonian world-machine, which suggested the existence of a mechanic God who had created the universe. According to this world-machine, God had no direct involvement in the world he had created but allowed it to run according to its own natural laws. In contrast, Romantics rejected the idea of a deist God of the Enlightenment and rather believed that “anyone seeking God will find him anywhere” (Novalis). Romantics instead upheld pantheism, a doctrine that equated God with the universe and all that is within it, including nature.

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