The greatest Representatives of Romantism

[JohnAvg]

In your opinion who are the most important personalities of Romantism in music(classic), literature, poetry, philosophy, painting

[JBI]

Goethe, Leopardi, Foscolo, Hugo, Novalis, Wordsworth, Pushkin, Beethoven, Friedrich, Wagner, Goya, Verdi, Hegel, Blake, Schiller. That seems a pretty narrow list though, as I didn't spread my range to include more painters, or more eastern European humanists.

Edit, add Henrich Heine and, if we can count him, Emerson.

Second edit, and Sir Walter Scott, Lord Byron, and Chateaubriand. I'm also looking for a romantic in the Spanish and Portuguese literary traditions, but my knowledge won't yield a major figureheads for either. The closest I come for Spanish seems to be Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, though he was a little too late I think.

[johann cruyff]

Also, John Keats and Shelley?

[JBI]

Also, John Keats and Shelley?

I didn't want to look anglo-centric, though I think I still came off that way. You could throw other Romantics in there as well, I just figured Wordsworth would say enough for the English romantic poetic movement. And I threw Byron in there because of his influence on his contemporaries, especially Pushkin.

[Bitterfly]

Ah, you forgot the French! What about Musset, Lamartine, Nerval, Vigny and Hugo for poetry? Chateaubriand, Hugo, Barbey d'Aurevilly, Gautier for prose.

And some musicians: Beethoven, Schumann, Schubert, Chopin, Lizst.

A philosopher: Hegel.

[Virgil]

Good list JBI. I would include Keats and Shelley. Yes, it might appear anglo centric, but the English Romantic poets were ciritical to Romanticism as a whole and we might as well include them. I would also include Emerson and Thereau (sp?) on the American side and as essayests. You left out painting. Any Romantic painters? I know this is far fetched and certainly debatable, I might include the impressionist painters as part of the Romantic movement. Though they may not fit time-wise, I do think they fit in spirit.

[stlukesguild]

To JBI's list you should certainly add the poets Hölderlin and Heinrich Heine... Jan Potocki, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Alphonese de Lamartine, Gerard de Nerval, the operatic composer Gioachino Rossini, composers Franz Schubert, Hector Berlioz, Anton Bruckner, Hugo Wolf, perhaps Johannes Brahms (although he may be a bit late), Franz Liszt, Robert Schumann, Frédéric Chopin, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (again another late entry), Vincenzo Bellini, Gaetano Donizetti, and artists William Blake, J.M.W. Turner, Caspar David Friedrich, John Constable, Eugene Delacroix, Théodore Géricault, Antoine-Jean Gros, Henry Fuseli, Samuel Palmer, Jean Baptiste Carpeaux, François Rude...

[stlukesguild]

I may have some idea where you are coming from with the suggestion of the Impressionist painters... but in all reality they were almost as far from Romanticism as possible. In fact they were intentionally anti-Romantic. Where Romanticism employed the fantastic, the grandiose, and the sublime... the Impressionists were focused upon that in their own back yard: Parisian nightclubs, ballerinas backstage at the theater, the landscape of Parisian suburbs. Nothing like Turner's almost apocalyptic views of nature at its most turbulent or Friederich's sublime of the endless horizons or antique ruins shrouded in mist. Impressionism was a sophisticated urban art form based almost entirely upon direct observation of the everyday world in which the artists lived and worked. Romanticism often employed the fantastic, the imagined, the invented... the feelings that were evoked by the artist's response to his subject.

[stlukesguild]

I love Gautier... but he is almost too late, isn't he. At that point we're getting closer to Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Henry James, Walt Whitman, etc...

[JBI]

I don't get it - people are suggesting I add things to my list that are there ) weird.

[Virgil]

I may have some idea where you are coming from with the suggestion of the Impressionist painters... but in all reality they were almost as far from Romanticism as possible. In fact they were intentionally anti-Romantic. Where Romanticism employed the fantastic, the grandiose, and the sublime... the Impressionists were focused upon that in their own back yard: Parisian nightclubs, ballerinas backstage at the theater, the landscape of Parisian suburbs. Nothing like Turner's almost apocalyptic views of nature at its most turbulent or Friederich's sublime of the endless horizons or antique ruins shrouded in mist. Impressionism was a sophisticated urban art form based almost entirely upon direct observation of the everyday world in which the artists lived and worked. Romanticism often employed the fantastic, the imagined, the invented... the feelings that were evoked by the artist's response to his subject.

I stand corrected StLukes. Thanks. It does seem the impressionist idolized nature and tried to capture an emotion. But I understand what you're saying.

[JBI]

For anyone interested, I posted a few Canadian romantic poems on the classical poetry thread in the poetry forum. They are interesting and good poems, though the poets themselves aren't quite so significant outside of Canadian traditions. The poems however, offer something which is rather mature, and often glimmering in early modernism.

http://www.online-literature.com/for...7&postcount=27
http://www.online-literature.com/for...2&postcount=33
http://www.online-literature.com/for...5&postcount=34

[Bitterfly]

I love Gautier... but he is almost too late, isn't he. At that point we're getting closer to Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Henry James, Walt Whitman, etc...

That's sort of true. He started off as a Romantic, before becoming a Parnassien.
By the way, I read somewhere that American Romanticism came later? At the beginning of the twentieth century. Is that true?

[JBI]

No, it came around 1840-1850, and stayed, I would argue, in one form or another until modernism.

In France and Russia Symbolism and realism were the in the middle, in England, Victorianism, which very much is its own genre, in Italy, the Decadent movement. In America however, things seem to have been slower.

This of course, is more apparent in Canadian literature, where Romanticism ended right when modernism came in, and didn't even really end until a little after that even.

[Bitterfly]

Ah, thank you. But then why did I read of Fitzgerald as an American Romantic? Because you couldn't even consider him as a modernist, could you? I have difficulty placing American authors in general, I must say... What about Hawthorne? What is he? Or even Poe? Couldn't he be considered as a Romantic (strains of the Gothic - which was Romantic)?

And wouldn't you say French Symbolism comes after Romanticism, rather, inspired by it but still distinct from it? And you have Decadent literature both in France and in England as well as in Italy.