Romanticism: A short introduction

Romanticism and classics

Romantic poets often compared themselves to birds, including surprisingly to eagles. Reminds me a bit of Ennius:

The term "poetry" extends beyond literal verse to include other arts, including painting. Reminds me a bit of the saying attributed to Simonides that painting is silent poetry; not a coincidence, since Lessing in his Laocoon apparently used this phrase as his starting point for arguing for a meaningful distinction between painting and poetry (a view the Romantics argued against).

It seems like there's opportunity for an investigation into the effects of Romantic interpretations of the classics (or very possibly many already exist). It feels like Romantic interest in the sublime, the figure of the poet (metapoetics), and connections between genres continue to shape modern approaches to classical texts.

Romanticism and Friedrich

For Ferber, "Romanticism was a European cultural movement, or set of kindred movements, which found in a symbolic and internalized romance plot a vehicle for exploring one’s self and its relationship to others and to nature, which privileged the imagination as a faculty higher and more inclusive than reason, which sought solace in or reconciliation with the natural world, which ‘detranscendentalized’ religion by taking God or the divine as inherent in nature or in the soul and replaced theological doctrine with metaphor and feeling, which honored poetry and all the arts as the highest human creations, and which rebelled against the established canons of neoclassical aesthetics and against both aristocratic and bourgeois social and political norms in favor of values more individual, inward, and emotional."
Many of these features are found in Friedrich, but not all
The most obvious part of this definition found in Friedrich is the shift to a 'detranscendentalized' religion. Friedrich is big on finding religion in nature: he elevates landscape to the highest genre and literally find religion in nature. A favorite topic is Gothic ruins in a natural landscape, e.g. Abbey in the Oakwood, along with crosses on a mountain or forest.

His view on religion though is hard to place. For Ferber, Friedrich's religious views take the form of a 'church as art,' an appreciation for the past rather than genuine belief:"it begins, almost as if it were a caption of a Friedrich painting; ‘Precious relics of an age that is no longer, / Their vaults trace a black shape against an azure sky.’"

Related in Friedrich's interest in the interaction between individual and nature. Harder to square with the definition per se, especially since Friedrich gives us so little insight into what individuals get out of nature. E.g. both monk at the sea and the wanderer give us the back and only invite us to guess what these figures are doing in these lonely and inhuman landscapes, or what they are learning about themselves from their encounters.
He is interested in the more powerful features of nature (maybe here like the homeric similes): an interest in the sublime (not found in the paragraph description above). Arctic Shipwreck, or North Sea at Moonlight in the Met exhibition

sublime: "... inspired by theories of the literary sublime and poetic accounts of it. So is Friedrich in Germany, with his scenes of mountains and mist, seashores and moon, and his near obsession with Gothic ruins reclaimed by nature."

evening and night: "Friedrich was the great painter of evening and night, and many other painters were intrigued by the challenge of catching the subtleties of twilight or moonlight."

Weekday Greek