The philosopher Isiah Berlin said that ‘The importance of Romanticism is that it is the largest recent movement to transform the lives and the thought of the Western world. It seems to me to be the greatest single shift in the consciousness of the West that has occurred.’

But What is Romanticism? What are the Roots of Romanticism? I head to the English Lake District to explore the philosophy of the Romantics through the eyes of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
The first thing almost everyone says about Romanticism is that it is impossible to define. I’ve introduced Romanticism on Then & Now before, but, loosely, it was a movement that spanned the end of the 18th and beginning of 19th centuries. It involved poets like Wordsworth, Byron, and Shelley and philosophers like Rousseau and Schelling, novelists and play writes like Goethe.

It emphasized the sanctity of the individual, the foregrounding of the every day, the ordinary, the privileging of emotion, intuitions, feelings, and criticized the cold reason and logic of the enlightenment, and the urbanization and industrialization that came with it.

Using Isaiah Berlin’s The Roots of Romanticism as my central guide, I take in the sights of the Lake District (Helvellyn, Grasmere, Keswick, Coniston, Windemere, Ullswater, Dove Cottage and more) through the eyes of a few key influential figures. Both Johann Georg Hamann and Johann Gottfried von Herder where central to the beginnings of the Romantic philosophy. I read the Prelude and Lyrical Ballads to find their influences. What else can we find out?

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Sources:

Isiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism
Emma Mason, The Camgbridge Introduction to William Wordsworth
Lewis P. Hinchman, What We Owe The Romantics
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: Making the Modern Identity
William Wordsworth, The Prelude
William Wordsworth & Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads
Jonathan Bate, Radical Wordsworth
David McCracken, Wordsworth and the Lake District
Ian Thompson, The English Lakes
Aidan Day, Romanticism
Friedrich Beiser, The Romantic Imperative
Peter Mortensen, British Romanticism and Continental Influences
The Cambridge Companion to British Romantic Poetry
Aseko Yoshikawa, William Wordsworth and the Invention of Tourism