Create a 2 page essay paper that discusses The Age of Romanticism.Download file to see previous pages Characteristics of the genre identified by Welleck (2003) include a “revolt against the principl

Create a 2 page essay paper that discusses The Age of Romanticism.

Characteristics of the genre identified by Welleck (2003) include a “revolt against the principles of neo-classicism criticism, the rediscovery of older English literature, the turn toward subjectivity and the worship of external nature slowly prepared during the eighteenth century and stated boldly in Wordsworth and Shelley” (196). The period idolized the imagination as the highest of human capacities due largely in part to its creative abilities and as a means of reacting to sweeping change in every aspect of life. It also esteemed nature not only because of the creative element inherent in it, but also because of the manifestation of the imagination that could be found within it in the sense that we create what we see. The world was full of symbols and signs that would portend future events and actions which were knowable through their relationship to the myths and legends of antiquity. According to Rene Welleck (2003), discussion of the new type of literature under the term Romantic began in the 1700s with its use by Schiller and the Schlegel brothers. It was the elder Schlegel brother who, in his lectures across Europe into the early 1800s, promoted the use of the term ‘Romantic’ to include “the German heroic poems such as the Nibelungen, the cycle of Arthur, the Charlemagne romances and Spanish literature from El Cid to Don Quixote” (Welleck, 2003: 189). In terms of the writers who exemplify this style of writing, most did not associate themselves with the Romantic movement, but are easily classified within this genre today. “Thomson, Burns, Cowper, Gray, Collins and Chatterton are honored as precursors, Percy and the Wartons as initiators.