Romantic Era Vs Enlightenment

The Romantic Era vs. The Enlightenment: The Ultimate Antithesis When we think back to the romantic era and the enlightenment, we create images of old philosophers and writers in the glow of a lamp trekking the way to the beliefs we rely on now by the edge of their pen. The noted people who started the ideals of America such as Locke, Voltaire, and Rousseau promoted equality for men, the free market, and that fact that we are created by our experiences. Perhaps we imagine those who blew our minds with novels like Walden, and Frankenstein by bringing in revolutionary themes through revolutionary genres. Although the 18th and 19th century and the notable people of the era may seem so distant in our past, we owe so much to the metaphysical journey
The enlightenment strove as “the Age of Reason” where they relied heavily on “ideals of freedom and equality for all, founded upon principles of human reason”(Bristow). Whereas the romantic era oppositely believed that “imagination is superior to reason”(“Introduction to Romanticism”). The foundation of the enlightenment was created by René Descartes' through his “famous method of doubt”(Bristow). The people involved in the enlightenment desired a world where we doubted everything and tested every assumption and used logic to decipher our problems. On the other hand, romantics believe that emotion is the way to uncover the truths of the world. They tended to write about things that evoked emotion and feeling such as the Gothic works that wanted to make the audience have a sense of terror and suspense. The enlightenment period was against this type of literature and they viewed it as “crude or even barbaric”(Murfin and Ray). Unlike the writers of the romantic era who preached for creativity in literature and poetry, the enlightenment thinkers had a point to their writing to fight against the slavery of their society such as censorship, taxes that benefited the upper class, but were paid by the middle class and a lot of other social issues pertaining to the church. Therefore, since the enlightenment was based off of reason and there literature was
For example, Newton was able to reason and uncover formulas and theories of the natural science behind our world using the “principles of reason of acquiring knowledge” that was discovered through the enlightenment(Bristow). Contrasting the enlightenment, the romantics “recognized the potential [of the] scientific developments[, but] they also felt undervalued by a world increasingly fixated on progress”(Murfin and Ray). Both groups saw the importance of scientific advancements, but romantics believed that we should not be lessened to only