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Tom Barson's avatar

This is a wonderful post and, frankly, a very welcome distraction at a difficult and stressful time. If it were to be expanded, I would add the observation that "romanticism" and its cult of intense feeling may better be viewed as part of a larger thing, or alternatively, was big enough to contain more than aestheticism and doomed sex. Certainly it was associated with philosophical idealism and its attempts to meet/justify/ground human needs for cultural identification and expression and (in a way that did not depend on revealed religion) human thirsts for transcendence. Herder and Fichte and Emerson and Thoreau lack the louche appeal of the crowd you mention, but they share something with them. (Last year's WoC podcast with Charles Taylor gets at some of this.)

And then there is this one incredibly romantic thing about idealism: it fails as a philosophy but succeeds as anthropology. Like romanticism, idealism get us. (Sigh.)

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Stuart F.'s avatar

It's interesting to me that Wordsworth and Coleridge, usually considered the first of the British Romantics, were both, even at their early career Romantic heights, were both quite pious Christians and lived relatively quiet small-c conservative lives; certainly they did not indulge in the Byronic excesses later associated with the movement.

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