December 4, 2012
The Romantics chose to cling on to people's humanity in the midst of an age where the systems were harsh and repressive. The Romantic Period was wrought with the pervasive turbulence of the revolutions proliferating during those times. As revolutions became rampant in the society, we see a different trend in the field of Literature. The Romantics used words as powerful weapons to channel their thoughts and to express their opinions without coercion and violence. The faith of Romanticism was the belief in the power of people's opinions. Romanticism believes in humanity. Individualism was highly given importance, for the potentialities and power of divergent opinions were greatly valued by both philosophers and poets. At a time when everything began changing in a pugnacious fashion, the Romantics made their advance in a radically nonconforming manner. Where brute force seemed to be the approach warring nations used to achieve their feats, the Romantics on the other hand considered a different method. Using their pens and brilliant minds, they appealed on human emotions to create a new domain that soon overshadowed all forms of writing in the few decades that it lasted for.
Romanticism was democratic because it gave writers the freedom to be governed by their imaginations. The Romantics were free to express their thoughts and feelings and put it out for the world to see. Human expression met no repression or suppression in Romanticism. Regardless of the occurring events in the external world, the Romantics paved the way to a new world – and this world was subjective in nature. Although this was the case, Romanticism was not solely used as an escape from the tyrannical ways of the government. The Romantics were not escapists. What they were doing was refusing to accept the eighteenth-century perception that the mind works by projecting what is happening in the already existing universe. Just