What Does It Mean to Romanticize? - by Madison Huizinga

For a long time, humans have taken an interest in the “romantic.” And I’m not just talking about romantic love (although Romeo and Juliet was published in 1595). I’m talking more about the ideas cultivated during the Romantic era of eighteenth-century Europe. Partially in reaction to the Industrial Revolution and the newfound doctrines of Enlightenment, Romanticism was an artistic and intellectual movement characterized by its emphasis on emotion and the idealization of nature. The period was all about feeling. Artists poured their hearts onto canvases in sweeping blush and blue hues. Poetry contained spontaneous outbursts of feeling, overflowing emotions onto a blank page like a gushing river. Many of these ideas were built upon those developed by philosopher Edmund Burke in his book A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757). Burke distinguishes between the aesthetic theories of “the sublime” and “the beautiful,” both of which are found r

For a long time, humans have taken an interest in the “romantic.” And I’m not just talking about romantic love (although Romeo and Juliet was published in 1595). I’m talking more about the ideas cultivated during the Romantic era of eighteenth-century Europe. Partially in reaction to the Industrial Revolution and the newfound doctrines of Enlightenment, Romanticism was an artistic and intellectual movement characterized by its emphasis on emotion and the idealization of nature. The period was all about feeling. Artists poured their hearts onto canvases in sweeping blush and blue hues. Poetry c