Response to Briana

Hey Briana, first up: Is Romanticism a trend? Yeah, it was a wave of insight and elements that gained momentum for a time like all movements and we got a lot out of it, as we’re learning in class it was a movement that will later lose momentum in America as the Realism movement starts. During last class I really got to see during the exercise where we labeled Whitman and Dickinson, that both writers are in the transition of movements and that Romanticism starts to fade and Realist writing starts to catch on because the American civil war is so sobering. But just like Realism was a reaction to state of things at the time, I learned from my Brit lit class about the Romanticism movement and how it was a reaction against the industrial revolution; in an age that seemed to treat more and more as objective romanticism played with the subjective. So I think you are definitely right to think that Romanticism seems like an escape and overly dramatic, when the movement started people at that time were seeing more machines and expanding cities and so they sought out nature and tranquility. As for your search for the essence of Romanticism, I can only offer what I think the movement would offer as it's main statement if it were a person, something along the lines of: "Hey, this advancing society isn't all that it's being portrayed as, maybe we're losing track of who we are, let's get back to basics and stop acting like we have all the answers." Hope this was some sort of help.