#1 - Jonathan Bate on the Age of Romanticism

Wanderer above the sea of fog - Casper David Friedrich

"Romanticism is above all a movement of ideas. The idea of revolution and the idea of nacionalism. The preposterous sugestion that women, slaves and even animals might have rights. Reverence the nature, vegetarianism and enviromental conscienceness. The radical theory of anarchism and the conservative theory of the organic state. The cult of personality and the very idea of sincerity. The reinvention of poetry as the expression of the self. The belief that nothing matters more to us as human beings than our sensations, our feelings. That individualism and individuals' ideals, whatever they might be, define our freedom and our modernity (...) The modern meanings of the words imagination, creativity, genius, literature. The freedom fighter on the streets and the hiker in the mountains. (...) The alarming notion that it might be glamorous to take drugs and to commit suicide or, at the very least, to live hard and die young. The rebel and the outsider. (…) These are all ideas that emerged or grew in the Romantic Age.”