Romantic Literature

Directly contradicting the ed theme of Enlightenment thinking Jean-Jacques Rousseau 's institutional opposition found many ardent supporters , influenced by his revolt against civilization , his plea to return to a state of Nature , his glorifications of emotion over thought and his passionate denunciation of life as organized by man (Sherwood 14 . As social reality during the Enlightenment repeatedly disappointed the fundamentally optimistic ideal that reform could end disasters there became a progressively more strident naturalism that eventually found its way into the poetry of Wordsworth , Shelley , and Byron . One could go as

far as to say that the Romanticism of Rousseau reflected a crisis in Enlightenment thought itself , a crisis which shook the comfortable eighteenth century philosophe out of his intellectual single-mindedness (15 . Rousseau 's Deist philosophy recognized a conformity between the immortal nature of his being and the constitution of the natural world , between the physical of the universe and the correspondent moral of human civilization (Woodring 30 . Rousseau sought truth and in the systems of Nature and purity in the uncluttered existence outside of civilization , believing that human constructs of sociability negated natural law and eroded the inherent capacity for moral virtue . Combined with his emphasis on intuition and emotion , which led the way in the development of the Romantic sensibility , Rousseau 's awareness of the interaction between the mind and the natural world anticipated the themes of Wordsworth (Raimond and Watson . The philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau helped lay the foundation for the Romantic view of nature , inspiring the British Romantic poets Wordsworth , Shelley , and Byron , who borrowed heavily from Rousseauian ideas of the inherent goodness of man , freedom as the natural state of life , the degenerative effect civilization places on the state of Nature

Often credited with ushering in the Romantic era , William Wordsworth lamented that poetry spanning John Dryden to Alexander Pope consisted of scarcely an image from external nature : from which it can be inferred that the eye of the poet had been steadily fixed on his object (Abrams 9 . The British Romantic poets resemble Rousseau in that their search like his , is moral , spiritual , and emotional . The English poet discovers self and seeks social community , in the process of exploring the reality in or beyond nature (Woodring 30 . The Romantics consciously pondered and explored their unique destiny . As almost a natural sequel to Rousseau 's thought in its confessional mode and emphasis on natural education for children , in The Prelude to Lyrical Ballads in 1798 , Wordsworth wrote that I have endeavoured at all times to look steadily at my subject (Abrams 9 , hoping to capture the sensuous nuance of natural phenomena that the reasonable eye of the Enlightenment poet missed . At half a century 's distance and from a European point of view , the poetic work of Wordsworth might be described as an English variety of Rousseauism , revised and corrected , in some parts , by the opposite influence of Edmund Burke , who in the Vindication of Natural Society extended , in satirical form , the...