Romanticism FRQ

**The period of Enlightenment was a time for people who developed ideas for the good of humanity.  Various philosophers brought about ideas about God and his plans for humankind and what He would want humans to do on Earth.  However, the period of thinking that followed was very different.  During the period of Romanticism, individualism became more important than thinking of God and society as a whole.  The period of Romanticism eradicated the effects of the period of Enlightenment by lessening the importance of God through  increasing the importance of the individual and what the individual feels.
**The majority of Enlightenment thinkers strove to determine what God's plan was for humankind.  Leibniz was a philosopher who believed that everything that happened must have been the very best thing that could possibly happen because God was eternally powerful and would not let anything bad happen to his people.  This was a theory of great optimism, one which Voltaire mocked in his satire Candide.  There were many more philosophers like Leibniz and pieces like Candide during the Enlightenment; religion-based works were the main product that came out of this time period.  Even Rousseau's work, The Social Contract, talked about the good of humanity as God would want it.  The period of the Enlightenment was mainly focused on God and humanity and how the two were related.
**The period that followed the Enlightenment was Romanticism.  In Romanticism, there were many controversial writers who branched away from the restrictions of writing such things that had to do with God.  Percy Bysshe Shelley may have been the most controversial when he got expelled from Oxford for writing a discourse on atheism.  At this time, because of the Enlightenment, stating that there was no God at all was one of the biggest crimes one could commit.  This philosophy of Godlessness led to a somewhat lackadaisical lifestyle and Shelley's breaking of the very social contract which Rousseau had written in disrespectfully leaving his first wife.  Even so, Shelley was one of the big influences of future authors, who also decided to stray from strict religious guidelines.  William Wordsworth, though less radical then Shelley, wrote a poem called Tintern Abbey, which talked about nature being the true "god" that ruled all and brought every living thing together.  John Keats was a surgeon-turned-writer who began to question God because of all the pain he had been through in his life.  His father had died when he was eight, and, during one of his operations, he truly felt the pain that his patient's screams expressed, so he decided to stop causing the pain and instead write about it in his poems.  Especially towards the end of his life, as he was dying of tuberculosis, John Keats wondered why there had to be such suffering in the world, and if it was God causing it all.
**Not only were there Romantic writers who strayed away from religious images, but there were also painters.  Up until this time, much art had been done for the Church.  Since much before the Enlightenment, in the time of Michaelangelo for example, paintings were commissioned by those who were rich enough to afford them, which was often the Vatican.  Even if the paintings were not religious, they all followed the realistic style up until Romanticism.  During the Enlightenment, paintings were very mathematical in their proportions and their technique of oil painting.  In the age of Romanticism, new techniques that had never been experimented with before started to arise.  One painter, Eugene Delacroix, used blending watercolors to try and put the same emotion into his paintings as poets like John Keats put into their poems.  Similarly, music was less mathematical.  Baroque music and music before the Romantics was also very mathematical in its counting and its dynamics.  During the age of Romanticism, one composer, Johannes Brahms, was able to deviate from the formula of writing music in order to convey more emotion in his pieces.
**Though the Enlightenment and the era of Romanticism were nearly consecutive, their products were not similar at all.  The products of the Enlightenment, being more focused on religion, helped to unravel the mysteries of God's plan as people thought God would want it.  Romantics, on the other hand, strove to let people be themselves and do things for themselves as opposed to God.  With this freedom, came emotion, emotion that can still be seen in writings, paintings, and compositions today.  Though the religious and humanitarian findings of the Enlightenment were still important, they were overshadowed by the benefits of individuality, emotion, and freedom that can be found in Romanticism.