SCHOLAR ISLAND

"Romance is deeper than reality--life is not a system, it is a Drama.
Romance is a holy donkey going to the temple
Realism is a lost donkey going nowhere."

G. K. Chesterton

"The typical Romantic poet of the nineteenth century was physically degenerate, or ailing, addicted to drugs and melancholia, critically unbalanced and a true poet only in his fatalistic regard for the Goddess as the mistress who commanded his destiny."

Robert Graves

"The age of Napoleon is the age of a new conception of man, whose European name is Romanticism. it places European man in opposition to a world only now conceived and experienced as the world outside, and it sees man as a creature both sentimental and heroic. The value by which this new man lives is neither piety nor virtue, neither loyalty nor constancy, nor even the search for scientific truth, but  his capacity for experience....The Will-not the common will of a body politic but his individual solitary will, mythologised to a heroic dimension-is his instrument. he is a maker of his kingdom: the powerful embattled personality we find in Balzac, Dickens or Melville....imposes its demands upon the world and attempts to fashion the world in its own image. Romantic, Faustian man forms, and in all but a literal sense creates, his own conditions and thus the world...his acts are no longer judged in relation to a publicly sanctioned moral code or agreed scheme of public virtues, or by his conformity to a traditionally accepted way of life, or even by the dictates of his conscience."

-J.P. Stern Hitler: the Fuhrer and the People

"Romanticism is the expression of a deep instinctive desire for the life of the mind, and we are still in the midst of the romantic period."

Robert Graves

"It will be protested at once that no age could be less like that of the genuine Romantics than ours. And with this objection I make all haste to agree. The modern romanticism is not in the least like the romanticism of Moore and de Musset and Chopin, to say nothing of the romanticism of Shelley, of Victor Hugo, of Beethoven. In fact, it is the exact opposite of theirs. Modern romanticism is the old romanticism turned inside out, with all its values reversed. Their plus is the modern minus; the modern good is the old bad. What then was black is now white, what was white is now black. Our romanticism is the photographic negative of that which flourished during the corresponding years of last century.

Aldous Huxley

"If you wish for a sharp test to divide the true romantic from the false (a valuable thing when considering the claims of a poet, a . Son-in-law, or a professor of modern history), about the best I can think of is this: that the false romantic likes castles as much as cathedrals."

G.K. Chesterton

"Romanticism emphasized the emotional, imaginative, and volitional aspects of the human personality at the expense of the logical faculties. It stressed religion, mysticism, intoxication. It longed for the unattainable, for the world beyond the stars. It reveled in fantastic dreams of a Utopia somewhere in the past or in the remote future. It worshipped beauty and adored art. It discovered the charm of medieval towns and helped to preserve some of them from plan less modernization. It revived forgotten lore and restored faith in the supernatural. It preferred the unexpected, the whimsical, the ironic, and the bizarre."

Steven Bela Vardy & Agnes Huszar Vardy

The Austro-Hungarian Mind: At Home and Abroad

"It is necessary to qualify my use of the loaded but useful term "Romantic." First, the group we now call "Romantic" did not, in fact apply the term to themselves-it is rather a term conferred upon them by history. Temporally, the Romantics may be traced back to the 1740's and forward into the 1820s; nationally they appeared throughout Europe, Britain, and even the nascent USA. Within these differences in time and place, they embraced different ideas and ideologies. They also spanned intellectual disciplines in a way that characterized the fluidity of disciplinary boundaries at that time. The "Romanticism" we see in Blundell's work is closest to the variety expressed by Lord Byron and Percey Shelley. It focused on Classicism and the secular study of myth and religion; it championed individual, creative thought and romanticized foreign cultures with "orientalism." "The Unknown" was there to feed the imagination and provoke exploration."

James M. Bradburne

Blood: Art, Power, Politics and Pathology

"The world must be romanticized. This is the way to rediscover its original meaning....By giving the base a lofty meaning, the ordinary an appearance of mystery, the known the dignity of the unknown and the finite an aura of infinity, I romanticize it."

-Novalis

"Now that his armour was clean, his helmet made into a complete head-piece, a name found for his horse, and be confirmed in his new title, it struck him that there was only one more thing to do: find a lady to be enamoured of. For a knight errant without a Lady is like a tree without leaves or fruit and a body without a soul."

-Cervantes, Don Quixote  (1605

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Book: Romanticism and Ideology" by Morse Peckham

          "Romanticism in England" by Butler

Book: "Romanticism At the End of History" by Jerome Christensen

Book: "The Tyranny of Elegance: Consumer Cosmopolitanism In the Era of Goethe" by Danield L. Purdy